Index-Catalog

Along the creaky main corridor of the old red-brick building of the Army Medical Library in Washington last week strode the librarian, Major Edgar Erskine Hume, a proud and happy man. In his hand he carried a green clothbound book fresh from the Government Printing Office. Nodding happily to library workers, doctors and military men whom he passed, Major Hume, a medium-tall Kentuckian, pushed through the swinging shutter of his office door, put hat and coat in a wardrobe whose dried panels rattled, sat down at the solid oak desk which all preceding librarians of the greatest medical library on earth have used.

Happy Major Hume uncovered the flyleaf of the book in his hand, read: "Index-Catalog of the Library of the Surgeon General's Office, United States Army (Army Medical Library), Authors and Subjects, Fourth Series, Vol. I."

He leafed into the book, read what he had written: "The beginning of a new series of the Index-Catalog . . . is a milestone in the scientific advancement of the world. This work is not only the medical standard, but the most comprehensive piece of bibliography ever attempted in any field of knowledge. That the fourth series begins in the year in which the library celebrates its centennial is also significant. . . . In 1873 Surgeon John Shaw Billings, U. S. Army, began the gigantic labor of preparing the Index-Catalog, a work in which both authors and subjects, the medical literature of the world can be found."

The Army Medical Library "now contains 394,003 volumes, 558,616 pamphlets -- in all 952,619 volumes and pamphlets." Current periodicals being indexed: 1,509. Oldest: Johannes Gerson's De Polhitione Nocturna, published in Cologne in 1467. All publications in the Army Medical

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