Dedication of the new building and hall of the Boston Medical Library Association, 19 Boylston Place, December 3, 1878 : order of exercises, address by the President, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, report of the building committee, remarks by Dr. J.S. Billings ... [et al.].

  • Boston Medical Library Association.
Date:
1881
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dedication of the new building and hall of the Boston Medical Library Association, 19 Boylston Place, December 3, 1878 : order of exercises, address by the President, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, report of the building committee, remarks by Dr. J.S. Billings ... [et al.]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    if I contented myself with borrowing the last word of the architect’s epitaph and only saying, Look around you! The reports of the librarian have told or will tell you, in some detail, what has been accomplished since the 21st of December, 1874, when six gentlemen met at the house of Dr. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch to discuss different projects for a medical library. In less than four years from that time, by the liberality of associations and of individuals, this collection of nearly ten thousand volumes, of five thousand pamphlets, and of one hundred and twenty-five journals, regularly received, — all worthily sheltered beneath this lofty roof, —has come into being under our eyes. It has sprung up^ as it were, in the night, like a mushroom ; it stands before us in full daylight as lusty as an oak, and promising to grow and flourish in the perennial freshness of an evergreen. To whom does our profession owe this already large collection of books, exceeded in numbers only by four or five of the most extensive medical libraries in the country, and lodged in a building so well adapted to its present needs? We will not point out individually all those younger members of the profession who have accomplished what their fathers and elder brethren had attempted and partially achieved. We need not write their names on these walls, after the fashion of those civic dig- nitaries who immortalize themselves on tablets of marble and gates of iron. But their contemporaries know them well, and their descendants will not forget them, — the men who first met together, the men who have given their time and their money, the faithful workers, worthy associates of the strenuous agitator who gave no sleep to his eyes, no slumber to his eyelids, until he had gained his ends; the untiring, im- perturbable, tenacious, irrepressible, all-subduing agitator who neither rested nor let others rest until the success of the project was assured. If, against his injunctions, I name Dr. James Read Chadwick, it is only my revenge for his having kept me awake so often and so long while