Memorial meeting in honor of the late Dr. John Shaw Billings, April 25, 1913.

  • New York Public Library
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Memorial meeting in honor of the late Dr. John Shaw Billings, April 25, 1913. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    1 MINUTE ADOPTED BY THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION AT ITS ANNUAL CONFERENCE AT KAATERSKILL, NEW YORK, JUNE 25, 1913 JOHN SHAW BILLINGS April 12, 1838-March 11, 1913 A member of the American Library Association 1881-1913 Its President, 1901-02. It is seldom that the death of an individual removes from two pro¬ fessions a unit of singular power in each. But such was the loss in the recent death of John Shaw Billings: a scientist in a department of science intensive and exacting, a librarian rigorously scientific in a profession broadly humane. To the former he made original contributions which constituted him an authority within special fields; but also, in his great Index-Catalogue of Medical Literature, one which assured certainty and promoted advance in every field, — and left the entire medical profession his debtor. As a librarian, having first brought to preeminence the profes¬ sional library entrusted to him, he was called to the organization into a single system of isolated funds and institutions; achieved that organiza¬ tion; and lived to see it, under his charge, develop into the largest general library system in the world, with a possible influence upon our greatest metropolis of incalculable importance to it, and, through it, to the welfare of our entire country. The qualities which enabled him to accomplish all this included not merely certain native abilities — among them, penetration, concentration, vigor, tenacity of purpose and directness of method, — but others devel¬ oped by self-denial, self-discipline, and a complete dedication to the work in hand. It was through these that he earned his education and his scien¬ tific training; and they hardened into habits which attended him to the end of his days, when he concluded in toil that shirked no detail a life begun in toil and devoted to detail. Such habits, a keen faculty of analysis, and a scientific training kept him aloof alike from hasty generalizations and from the impulses of mere emotion; while his military training induced in him three characteristics which marked alike his treatment of measures and his dealings with men: incisiveness, a distaste for the superfluous and the redundant, and an insistence upon the suitable subordination of the part to the whole. In this [26]