Chapin, whose excellent project is indorsed by
well-known New York physicians and professors, proposes to publish a
yearly index to original communications in the medical journals of the
United States, classified by authors and subjects. But it is from the
National Medical Library at Washington that we have the best promise and
the largest expectations. That great and growing collection of fifty
thousand volumes is under the eye and hand of a librarian who knows books
and how to manage them. For libraries are the standing armies of
civilization, and an army is but a mob without a general who can organize
and marshal it so as to make it effective. The "Specimen Fasciculus of a
Catalogue of the National Medical Library," prepared under the direction
of Dr. Billings, the librarian, would have excited the admiration of
Haller, the master scholar in medical science of the last century, or
rather of the profession in all centuries, and if carried out as it is
begun will be to the nineteenth all and more than all that the three
Bibliothecae--Anatomica, Chirurgica, and Medicinae-Practicae--were to the
eighteenth century. I cannot forget the story that Agassiz was so fond
of telling of the king of Prussia and Fichte. It was after the
humiliation and spoliation of the kingdom by Napoleon that the monarch
asked the philosopher what could be done to regain the lost position of
the nation.
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