John Shaw Billings
From HLWIKI Canada
 19th C. physician and librarian To browse other articles on a range of HSL topics, see the wiki index.
IntroductionSee also Canadian Health Librarians - Leaders, Past and Present and Famous librarians in history John Shaw Billings (1838 - 1913) was a surgeon, medical librarian and bibliographer of some distinction in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries. The NLM & its history are steeped in stories about Billing's creative abilities. The world of medical librarianship owes considerable credit to him for bringing medical literature into a more coherent, indexed form. Billings graduated from Miami University and the Medical College of Ohio, and joined the U.S. Army Medical Department in 1862. With the outbreak of the Civil War, he enlisted in the Union Army and served as medical inspector of the Army of the Potomac and was eventually posted to the office of the U.S. Surgeon General as Lieutenant Colonel. He organized hospitals in Washington, D.C. and served as field surgeon at the battles of Gettysburg and Petersburg. Staying in the Army Medical Corps after the war, he organized the Library and Museum of the Office of the Surgeon General of the United States Army. This led to work on the first US Census while active on the National Board of Health. Known as an expert in planning, Billings was asked to plan a hospital for Johns Hopkins University. He later planned six other medical institutions, sat as professor of Hygiene at the University of Pennsylvania and chaired the Carnegie Institution Board. Best known for his work as a librarian and bibliographer, Billings built the collection of the Office of the Surgeon into the world renowned National Library of Medicine (U.S.) and created the Index Catalogue (NLM's IndexCat) and Index Medicus (now Medline). The National Library of Medicine (NLM) Classification Scheme was developed in the 1940s but its development can be traced back to Billings' bibliographic work. A number of other librarians were influenced by Billings such as Herbert Putnam and Charles Cutter whose work on the Library of Congress classification system in the late 1890s eventually led to the NLM classification. Billings also influenced Belgian Paul Otlet and his Universal Decimal Classification system. Billings spent the last 17 years of his life as the first director of the New York Public Library. There, he united the libraries of New York to form the New York Public Library. Billings also inspired Andrew Carnegie to provide funds for the construction of sixty-five branch libraries in New York, and 2509 libraries in cities and towns across the US, Canada and Britain. He died in New York City in 1913 at the age of 74. ExhibitionsSee also
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