Snapshot of the Medical Librarian as Historian and Bibliographer, to 1947

摘要

IN the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association (36: 214-15, 1948) there is an unsigned editorial entitled "Medical librarians as medical historians" that begins: "As a group, medical librarians are probably more keenly aware of our local cultural medical inheritance than any other organized group." Despite its title, the editorial does not cover the ground encompassed by this snapshot; but its opening sentence does tend to support the thesis that, of all specialized librarians, the medical cadre seems from the beginning to have been particularly responsive to the historical aspects of its patron discipline. The dramatic nature of the discipline might account for this, in part. A more compelling reason, perhaps, is the fact that medical libraries have generally been started by, and found their strongest supporters in, physicians with strong historical or bibliophilic leanings. Librarians, of course, have no priestly immunity to infection. Indeed, a goodly number have borne infection by the historical virus so cheerfully that they have been led deliberately to act as carriers. This paper proposes, without pretense of exhaustive research, to bring into focus for a moment some medical librarians who have published medico-historical or bibliographical studies from the founding of the Medical Library Association, in 1898, to the year 1947, from which point further details may be gleaned in the article by Dr. Schullian in this issue of the Association's BULLETIN. It has seemed advisable to train our sights, generally, only on full-time professional medical librarians for whom these ventures represented labors of love.