The Lives of Don J.T.

Except for the President's palace, the most famous address in Chile was once 49 Doce de Febrero, Santiago. Here was the center of Chile's intellectual life, the home of a slight, courtly figure known as "Don J.T." Until his death in 1930, Jose Toribio Medina reigned as Chile's cultural grandee, dispensing advice and talk to all who came to see him. Scholars and celebrities flocked to him, and it was even a tradition for foreign diplomats to pay their respects soon after they arrived in town.

Last week, for the 100th anniversary of his birth, statesmen and scholars were once again paying Don J.T. their respects. In the auditorium of the Pan American Union in Washington, D.C., 120 gathered to discuss the vast accomplishments of his many careers. There was Medina the historian, Medina the bibliographer, Medina the numismatist, as well as Medina the critic, the Cervantista, the lexicographer, geographer, anthropologist, printer and archeologist. It took the Union's visitors three days to cover the ground.

Bugs & Vampires. The son of a Santiago judge, Don J.T. did not start out to lead so many lives. As soon as he graduated from the Institute Nacional at 16, he was bundled off to the University of Chile to study law. The course was supposed to ake five years, but Medina tossed it off in three.

Even before getting his degree, young Medina had found himself bored with the law. And so, between classes and cases, he studied bugs. He discovered the insect Congrophora Medinae, wrote about vampire legends, and in his spare time transated Evangeline into Spanish. Then, in 1874, he was appointed secretary to the Chilean legation in Lima, Peru. There, just "to kill time," he took up history and literature.

Animals & Aborigines. He wrote the first definitive book on Chilean colonial literature. Later, while serving as a provincial magistrate, Don J.T. got interested in botany and anthropology. He searched for rare plants, dug for bones of prehistoric animals, discovered a hitherto un-snown type of Megatherium (a kind of sloth). Meanwhile, he began pioneering in a field that had never been explored before: a monumental history of South American aborigines.

By the time he was 35, Don J.T. was known to almost every major library on both sides of the Atlantic. Wherever he went, he dug deep into yellowed archives, and in Seville's Archives of the Indies alone, he unearthed 700 bundles of documents that no one had known about. Out of all these explorations. Medina became interested in writing bibliographies, establishing the location and writing the description of thousands of books and documents concerned with South American history, As his volumes poured forth, Don J.T. gradually earned a new title: "the greatest bibliographer in Christendom."

Coins & Cartography. But bibliography was still only a part of his work. In his book-lined rooms in Santiago, Medina's life fell into a pattern of prodigious production. He wrote the first histories of South American printing, seven works on the Inquisition, put out a bibliography of Cervantes. He collected coins, studied cartography, wrote books on the history of Chilean geography. "You ought not to let a morning pass," he would say, "without making a memorandum, an afternoon without writing a page, an evening without reading a line."

By following his own advice, Don J.T. produced more than 300 books. In the last years of his life, peering through his pince-nez, presiding over his lavish table and transfixing his guests with his talk, he was still producing about five new volumes a year. "The Biblical legend," he once said, "claims that work was placed on man as a punishment, but if it is a punishment, I would say that it proceeded from a loving father." Last week, scholars were still trying to catch up with the wonder-producing punishment of Don J.T.

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