John Shaw Billings (
April 12, 1838-
March 11, 1913), US
physician and
librarian
Billings graduated from
Miami University in
Ohio in
1857 and the
Medical College of Ohio in
Cincinnati, OH in
1860. During the US
Civil War, he served as a
surgeon in the
US Army, attaining the rank of
Lieutenant Colonel and the post of Medical Inspector of the
Army of the Potomac. He was in the field at the battles of
Chancellorsville and
Gettysburg and served during the
Wilderness Campaign and the
Siege of Petersburg. He was the first surgeon to successfully remove an
ankle joint, a fact which vividly illustrates the primitive state of 19th century
medicine.
After the war, for thirty years he headed the Library of the
Surgeon General’s Office, which would later become the
National Library of Medicine (NLM), and turned a small collection of 2000 volumes into the world’s largest collection of medical literature. He also compiled extensive indexes of medical literature, in
1880 the first volume of a catalogue of the contents of the Surgeon General’s library, and in
1879 the first volume of the
Index Medicus, which would later evolve into what is now
MEDLINE, the NLM’s online database.
Billings became the first director of the
New York Public Library, serving from
1896 to
1913. Planning that institution was a delicate task because it involved the consolidation of three philanthropic libraries created by
John Jacob Astor,
James Lenox, and
Samuel Tilden. He was also involved in the planning of seven
hospitals, including
Johns Hopkins Hospital in
Baltimore.
Sources include: http://www.medlib.iupui.edu/hom/billings.html, http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/tour/portraits1.html