Dr. Jeff Reznick: Before I do introduce Dr. Greenberg, our speaker for this afternoon, I want to mention that our next seminar will be held on November 1st, next week, from two to three thirty in the Visitors Center just across the way.

It's a special Hispanic History Month program. We'll be welcoming Professor Joanna Hernandez of Baruch College at CUNY. She will be speaking on the Young Lords and the struggle for racial justice and public health in New York, so please join us then.

So our speaker for this afternoon is NLM's own Dr. Steven J. Greenberg.

Dr. Greenberg received his doctorate in early modern history from Fordham University with his dissertation on the subject of early printing and publishing.

After teaching for several years, he returned to school at Columbia University specializing in rare books and archival management. Since 1992 he has worked in the History of Medicine Division here at NLM where he currently serves as Coordinator of Public Services.

Dr. Greenberg’s papers and publications span a number of fields, including the history of printing and publishing, medicine and surgery in early modern Europe, and the history of medical librarianship. Among many other publications, Dr. Greenberg is author of The Great Contribution: Index Medicus, Index Catalogue, and IndexCat.

Published in the journal of the Medical Library Association in 2009, and this essay was winner of Archivists and Librarians in the History of Health Sciences (ALHHS), their Best Journal Article award that same year.

Dr. Greenberg is also a recipient of the Medical Library Association’s annual Murray Gottlieb prize for the best unpublished essay on the history of medicine and allied sciences written by a health scientist librarian.

So complementing Dr. Greenberg’s record of publishing overall are his active, very active membership in the NIH LifeWorks Speakers Bureau.

Steven represents HMD and NLM, as many of you know, on many occasions throughout the year. He has also been interviewed on numerous occasions by the national and regional press including National Public Radio’s Marketplace, and NIH Radio's podcast series.

Dr. Greenberg is an adjunct professor at the College of Library and Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he lectures frequently on the history of the book, and he is currently president of the Archivists and Librarians in the History of the Health Sciences (ALHHS), the only national organization devoted solely to that field.

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Greenberg why is going to be speaking to us this afternoon on NLM at 175: A Librarian’s View.

[Applause]

Dr. Greenberg: I am always interested in meeting these people after hearing these great introductions. Um, let me begin by pointing out this particular picture to you.

Um, this is what dawn at NLM, okay which is when I always seem to be arriving, no matter what time of the year it is.

And actually dawn is going to be something of a recurring theme in my presentation today, so...

When I first talked myself into trying to convince other people to let me give this presentation, I was working on a title and I came up with NLM: A Librarian’s View because though I have been trained both as a librarian and a historian, being a librarian pays much, much better.

Um, I came up with this because I realized if I got up as a historian, people might want me to be comprehensive and theoretical and I wasn't really in the mood to do either.

I can do the von  Ranke thing okay, I could say well, I am going to tell you how it really was, and be very old school and dramatic about that, and I don’t really do that.

Or I could do the Macaulay thing and say well you know we are always going to this inevitable end you know, it's a seamless progression, to where we are now and that doesn't work either because history has a way of making a turn when you least expect it.

I could do the Voltaire thing and I could be very arch and superior and say that history is a bag of tricks, you know, we play upon the dead, haha, or I could be the skeptic, you know, Henry Ford, history is more or less bunk.

And I figure the way to get out from under that was to quote one of my favorite works in history, a book called 1066 and all that. I do not as a rule read my PowerPoint slides to people, ‘cause you guys can read too, but the point of this is very simple, okay.

History is what you remember. If you don't remember it, it's not history, it's not worth it. So this is going to be, and again I am stealing from 1066 and all that, a memorable history of the library.

And I have taken actually as my mentor here, a person who has actually made something of a cameo appearance in the history of the library itself, Jerry Garcia [laughter].

It has been a long, strange, but very much a fun trip.

So here we are, the family portrait, I'm actually almost recognizable somewhere over there standing behind Sheldon.

And I had, see this was one of the great moments because you get to stand in front of the library and say well gee look at all this great stuff we are celebrating because after all it's the 175th anniversary, 1836, and it's the anniversary of the library, right?

Well, sort of. I can actually make a case and I will, that we could choose any one of three birthdays. We could choose 1818, we could choose 1836, we could choose 1865.

1818 was an important year in the library’s history. The Surgeon General of the U.S. Army, Joseph Lovell died, ah no I’m sorry, Lovell gets the library in 1818, he dies in 1836 and he is actually the first Surgeon General to say to the Congress, hey, um, we need books and journals for our doctors.

But, and he starts asking for them as soon as he gets here in 1818, but the thing with Lovell is he's not collecting things for a central repository; he is sending them out to doctors in the field.

So while he is purchasing journals and medical books on a regular basis, he is not keeping them, in a central repository. Lovell dies in 1836 and he is going to be replaced by Thomas Lawson.

But it is going to take Lawson a little amount of time to get to Washington to take over his new job so the interim is Benjamin King.

And if any of you have read the blurb that I put out for this talk you'll notice the hat.

Here's the deal, King as Acting Surgeon General sends a letter to the Secretary of War saying, we're going to want the money we've always gotten to buy books and journals to send them out to the docs, but we want some more money because we want to keep a collection for ourselves.

It goes out in November of 1836 as a letter to the Secretary of War and it's signed by King, but the assumption has always been that Lawson told King to do it so therefore, Lawson gets the credit.

So if you are looking for a day to mark on your calendar, go with November 1836, the date of the letter King sent the Secretary of War under Lawson’s presumed direction as the start of the library.

So here we are in our original home, and of course we have those lovely models outside. This is the old Riggs Bank building and the Surgeon General’s office was on one of the upper floors and that is where that first shelf of books goes.

And that is the home of the library right through the Civil War when we get to our third date, 1865.

And here we have army Surgeon General Joseph Barnes, that's Joseph Barnes in the middle here. They are the staff of the Surgeon General’s office and they are the people using that library. And they are getting pretty busy because the Civil War was an unprecedented event and the army spent much of the war trying to catch up, trying to provide medical care to the troops on a scale that had never before even been imagined.

In 1866 Barnes and his staff moved in to a new building, Ford's Theater.

Um, some of you may be familiar with the idea that ticket sales at Ford kind of went down after April of '65 and the building was taken over for a non-payment of taxes and such and the library moved in there and was there until 1888.

We are there a long time. And they are busy, not only are they collecting books and journals for a permanent collection but they are also sending them out for the troops and they're  putting out the library’s first major publication, The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, 1861 to 1865.

The first volume appears in 1870, and I don’t know if you can quite see it but not only is there this very interesting lithograph based on a photograph from the collection, but the patient's name is listed.

This is a multi-volume work. It is the source for the history of the Civil War and obviously HIPAA hadn't gotten there yet.

Here is that staff picture again, and here in this nice little circle here is our ‘65 candidate,  arguably the most important man to be involved in the library, John Shaw Billings.

Billings was a midwesterner, he had come east, he had gotten a position as an assistant surgeon with the Army of the Potomac, saw some combat, didn't care for it very much, and ends up getting put on the staff of the Surgeon General’s office...

And he is given the job of looking after the books. [?] a picture of Billings. He is one of these guys that really stares, you know, these Victorian types that do everything in 500 volumes and it's all perfect.

Some of you may know that when Billings left the library in 1895, he became the first director of the New York Public Library when the library was formed up there.

This is one of my favorite pictures, but even though this is William Osler, it gives you kind of a connection...there's a long connection between us and John Hopkins.

Here you've got Osler, flying around here, and he is chasing all these little microorganism critters, and you have the original John Hopkins Hospital buildings over there which were designed by John Shaw Billings.

When they put together the original John Hopkins faculty, Billings went to Germany to convince William Welch to come back from Dresden to become the first chair of pathology in an American medical school.

He was a busy guy. And I am very pleased that in a couple of weeks, that my colleague Jim Labosier will be talking more about Billings and the library in more detail.

And one thing that I think Billings should be remembered for is a vision that he had for the future of this library, really early on.

Now most of you are familiar with the Index Catalogue, the Surgeon General’s catalogue. This is the first page of the trial runs, Specimen Vesiculosus, that Billings put together in 1876 to convince the Congress to give him money for the Surgeon General’s catalogue.

And I want you to notice that it says here, it is a catalogue of a national medical library. Long before any bill was passed by the Congress constituting us as such. He saw a vision as early as 1876 that this could be a resource for the entire country and the history of medicine and in modern clinical medicine.

And he gets the money from Congress, yay, and so he starts the Surgeon General’s catalogue.

Eventually over 60 volumes are published, and of course you have the companion, which turns out to be in fact a more important publication, the Index Medicus. And it's kind of nice, I’ll show you more about this later, but if you notice, this is the first page of the first series of the Index Medicus, and you'll notice that it gives you the location here, Library Hall.

And I actually have a picture of  Library Hall that I will show to you in a moment. The relationship between the Index Catalogue and the Index Medicus is complicated and I have written about it elsewhere and so I will not bore you with it today but there are two things that I would like to point out to you.

And one is the fact that the IndexCat is of course a government publication, Washington GPO, but Index Medicus was privately published which leads to some of the interesting bits of its history because the Index Medicus was always kind of the poor relation of Index Catalogue in the 19th century.

It's what they sort of did in their spare time to kind of keep up with things. Billings’ right hand man, Robert Fletcher, assistant director of the library under Billings for many years, and the man you have to blame more or less for the existence of both IndexCat and Index Medicus.

The idea with Index Medicus was it was going to keep us up-to-date. Index Catalogue took 15 years to go through the first series 1880 to 1895. It was journals, journal titles, monographs, and selected articles, not every article from a given journal.

And the story goes that Fletcher turns to Billings and says, but John, how are we going to keep up?

If someone comes up with an article on aardvarks and we’ve just done the A volume, it's going to take us years and years to get back around. And Billings says, that’s okay Bob, you know what we'll do, we'll take a bunch of journals that we trust and we will index them from cover to cover, we will publish it every couple of months and that’s how we'll keep up.

Which we're still doing. In fact, [?] is meeting as we speak and [?] is the direct descendent of this decision to have a second publication that would help them keep up.

Fletcher needed an assistant and his assistant was Fielding Garrison. Garrison is the only librarian I know, or have ever heard of who went and got a MD to become a better medical librarian.

He was in the army when he got his MD, they ended up sending him to the Philippines which was something of a surprise; and the question has always been raised, why did they never make Garrison the director of the library.

He dearly wanted the job and eventually when he didn't get it he went to Baltimore and became the first director of the Welsh Library at Hopkins. But now it can be told. I have found the reason.

He shaved off his mustache. Every NLM director, every Army Medical Library director had a mustache until very very recently.

[Laughter]. So there you go, now it can be told. The library was moved out of Ford’s Theater for a very simple reason, and those of you who deal with library storage know what I am talking about. The way you build a theater is not the way you build a library.

The weight of the book stack was ripping the building apart. So eventually this building here, known as the Old Red Brick, was opened.

If you're not familiar with the location, it's where the Hirshhorn Gallery is now, more about that in a moment, and if you are standing on Independence Avenue with your back to the library looking straight across the mall you see the National Archives.

The building had two different halls, one for the Army Library, one for the Army Medical Museum.

The museum stayed there long after the library left and there are many many stories that are told about the library and the Old Red Brick. Here is the Hirshhorn, the way it looks now. Now the Old Red Brick had a very interesting distinction.

According to several independent resources, I really tracked this one down because I didn't want to tell you anything that wasn't exactly correct, it is the last government building in D.C. to have an outhouse.

And when they knocked down the building and replaced it with the Hirshhorn, if you know the Hirshhorn, obviously they are still having plumbing issues. By the way the sculpture over here um, when I took the picture of the Hirshhorn, this sculpture was in the garden.

It's about nine feet tall, it's a bunch of rubber and it's called Subcommittee, and I just, how could you leave that out. Here is the Library Hall, originally no artificial lights, so you are getting light in through the skylight here and through the side windows.

Some people say that that is a picture of Billings over there, I’m not sure, I can't get high resolution enough to get close enough, but we were there for many, many years.  [Image of library space with study tables and chairs, and a figure sitting at one table on the right.]

And fun things happened. For example, Walter Reed became director of the library in 1902, notice he has a mustache. These things are important.  [Image of Walter Reed.]

And no, I am not intending to become the director of the library by the way, we'll get that on record.

Reed has the briefest tenure in the history of the library. In fact, it is not entirely clear whether he actually entered the building while he was director, he was already dying, um, of a ruptured appendix.

Okay, so he was dying of peritonitis when he was given the position.

Okay, now we come to the audience participation part of the program.  [Slide with images of four women and one of NLM in the lower right.]

One of the great things about the history of the library is we've always had friends who've helped us in other places and I’ve put up some faces of librarians who, from the very beginning, as you can see from the dresses on the left,

have been friends of the library, helping us, guiding us, making suggestions as to what can we do to be more useful and we will see how good you guys are.

Anybody know who that is?

Hit the little button you know, so I can see a red light because right now all I can see is the spotlights. That's Marcia Noyes. Anyone? Very good, oh well I, uh, thank you. This one is easy. Nope, that is Janet Doe. Think west coast.  Got to have friends.

So this is the library as it was, thank you. This is the library as it was basically at the beginning of the Second World War.  [Image of man sitting behind reference desk, caption reading The Reference Desk, C.F. Mayer, prop.)

Still an army institution publishing IndexCat, Index Medicus, but basically being a kind of old fashioned bricks and mortar, book and paper institution.

This is the reference desk.  That is Claudius Mayer who did reference, was the last editor of the IndexCat ,and I’m pretty sure that those are in fact Index Catalogue volumes right there. But times change.

During the Second World War, Congress was afraid that, I am not making this up, that German submarines were going to sail up the Potomac up to the Tidal Basin and possibly shell the mall. [Image of building, caption reading Cleveland Rocks!]

So what is now the History of Medicine collection was moved to Cleveland because the Germans never did get to Cleveland. Then again they never did, well never mind.

Much rebinding of books was done in Cleveland, this is a picture of the HMD Bindery and fashions hanged. [Image of book-binding operation captioned The HMD Bindery in Cleveland.]

Back then you took a book and put it in a good, solid binding whether it needed it or not and modern conservationists would be appalled. But you know, it was state-of-the-art in 1945.

And the curator of the collection, a librarian bibliographer named Dorothy Schullian, took the discarded book bindings home with her, and soaked them apart in her bathtub because hand-bindings are normally done by putting bits of binders [?] or whatever else you can find in the collection, um, you know laying around the shop, in between the leather of the bindings and the boards.  [Image of damaged page from book, captioned From Dorothy's Bathtub.]

And sometimes you could soak them apart and come up with recognizable bits of other books.

And that's what Dorothy Schullian did. We still have the scraps, anything that could be recognized was catalogued, you know, as part of our “Bathtub Collection” which is searchable under that term in LocatorPlus.

So not all of was lost. At the end of the war, took a couple of years, but there was kind of a different approach that was timed for the library to branch out a little bit. [Image of about ten people standing in front of large columns, captioned Frank Bradway Rogers & friends.]

Here you have Frank Bradway Rogers, Brad Rogers, in his army uniform, with his mustache.

Um, actually, that's Gertrude Annan over there. Rogers has an interesting distinction. He is the only director of the library to have a library degree.

But in point of fact he got it after he got here, he was hired, they said go up to Columbia, get a library degree, and when you're done, come back here, we'll make you director. By the way, the glamour-puss over here, we will get to her in a moment.

It was Brad Rogers why kind of pointed the library in a new direction in terms of broadening things out, in terms of becoming not just a military resource, but a national resource, picking up on some of the things that Billings had in fact tried to do; and he had, as a helper, Estelle Brodman. [Head shot of Frank Bradway Rogers, 1914-1987, Director, 1949-1963.]

Brodman had been one of his professors at Columbia and when he came back to the library with his degree, he brought Brodman with him. [Head shot of Estelle Brodman, 1914-2007.]

Um, if you are looking for some very interesting reading, we have oral histories of Brad Rogers, of Brodman, and a bunch of the important librarians of the period; and it's interesting to read their different ideas of what a national library could be, and what NLM could be.

In Estelle Brodman's oral history she talks about teaching a class that had Brad Rogers and about four other people who later became presidents of the Medical Library Association in the same class.

And I think the only surviving person from that group is Erich Meyerfoff and I asked Erich if he remembers that and Erich, if you know Erich Meyerhoff, I know some of you do, he is a very thoughtful sort of guy; he says well, you know we were all there at the same time, but I don’t think there was a class that ever had us all in it at the same time.

So, there was  moment when Columbia, which is now gone for twenty years, was poised to really send out platoons of people to become librarians in important institutions.

So we get out of the red brick. We become briefly, we go through a bunch of names actually kind of quickly. [Image of man at podium, captioned Groundbreaking for the new building, 1959.]

For a little while we are the Armed Forces Medical Library, and then we become the National Library of Medicine and this is the groundbreaking for the building, building 38; with an entirely different focus, with a much broader focus.

We are no longer just a military library, we're a library for a much broader population. Um, these are pictures taken of the library when it was brand new and I actually, Mehryar Ebrahimi asked me if we have pictures like this and I kind of included this one in. [Image of NLM rotunda, circa 1962.]

This is the way the rotunda area, which is now of course housing the new Native Voices exhibit, looked when it was the card catalogue room.

Times change. 1963, Martin Cummings becomes director of the library and of course Dr. Cummings just recently passed away, and um, what you are seeing here is one of the first input devices for MEDLARS. [Head shot of Martin Cummings on the left, captioned Martin Cummings (Director, 1963-1984) and MEDLARS, and on the right, a photo of man standing at a table tapping on the keyboard of a machine sitting on the table.]

And when you get into that kind of computer system, a number of things have to happen. First of all you really have to start paying attention to your acronyms. Yes, MEDLARS is something other than Medical Literature Analysis Retrieval System, it's a fruit and you can make jelly out of it. [Image of jar labeled Medlar Jelly.]

Doesn't taste very good I can tell you, it's much better as an acronym... have you ever had one of those jelly donuts where the jelly is just kind of red, and that's all it tastes like; that’s MEDLARS.

You have to have good acronyms, and we have been very good with our acronyms. Particularly this one. [Image of bound report titled National Library of Medicine, Medical Subject Headings.]

One of the things I had to do with the article that Jeff mentioned earlier, when I was writing about IndexCat and Index Medicus,

is to notice the subject heading systems that they used, and one of the things that will drive you crazy if you go back and forth between Index Catalogue and Index Medicus, is they use different subject headings. MESH standardizes things.

One could argue that this book, this is the first edition of the first version of MESH from 1960, is in fact one of the library’s most important publications because suddenly we are all on common ground. We know what we are talking about.

You know, is it consumption, is it tuberculosis, is it this, is, you know what is it; is it cancerous disease, or is it leprosy. And of course this is an absolute, precondition to any computer system; you must have a controlled vocabulary or else no one will know if we are talking about the same things.

And the idea of reaching out, the Regional Medical Library network. This is a picture that I plucked out of our Images in the History of Medicine database, showing a very early map of the regions. [Image of United States map, broken  up into regions, captioned RML Map, c. 1970.]

You know, this was not done on a computer, folks. We've gotten better at the maps. But there are always things around the library if you look at them closely you sort of pass by them day to day to day and they don't always make much of an impression, but if you know go up Center Drive and you look towards your right, we still have the tree. [Image of tree on NLM campus with close-up of accompanying plaque titled Tree of Hippocrates, Plantanus Orientalis.]

Okay, this tree is supposed to be from a cutting from the tree that Hippocrates sat under on the island of Cos. Used to be that SUNY-Buffalo had a bunch of seeds from that tree.

If you were starting a new medical library, you could get a seed. I don’t know if they still do that. But you know so many of us walk past this, or drive past this every day and forget that we have our history right there.

This is one of my favorite books in the library collection. It's not one that we drag out for everybody because it’s really small, as you can see. Those are Holly Herro's thumbs, and they're not that big. It's a very tiny little book. [Image of hands holding a small, aged book open for display.]

This is a production you might say, of Conrad Gesner. Now, he have fun with Gesner because Gesner makes these wonderful books with animals, and birds, and plants, and things. And we have done a Turning the Pages on them, and they are really a whole lot of fun.

But as the book title will tell you, Gesner liked his friends, this is his book of friends, the "Liber Amicorum.”

And when people came to visit, he'd have them write something in this little guest book. And some of the things that are in there are really rather remarkable. See that tiny little circle over there? That's it, blown up.

It’s the Lord's Prayer, handwritten, 1556, by someone whose penmanship is a lot better than what mine will ever be. Does it have anything to do with medicine, no not really, but it just reminds you of what a different world he lived in, and yet it is still in our collection, it's safe and it's sound, and it's in the incunabula room, and we can take it out for anyone who wants to see it.

Another one of my favorite items in the collection, we will blow it up a little bit here, this is Marshall Nirenberg’s DNA chart which we've had much fun with over the years. [Image of Nirenberg's hand-drawn DNA chart.]

You know after Watson and Crick wrote their article, someone had to figure out if they'd actually had gotten it right and [?] the things up and down the line and that's what Nirenberg did, and that's what got him this Nobel Prize; and his papers are here at the National Library of Medicine, the DNA molecule that hangs from the rotunda  comes from there as well.

And it was kind of a scary object lesson because if this was done today, it would be an Excel spread sheet, which means twenty years from now, we would have almost nothing readable.

My doctoral dissertation, which I do not exactly recommend you read unless you are suffering from insomnia, is on five-inch floppy disks written with [?] on DOS 3.1. Now the only thing that a five-inch floppy disk is good for these days is as a rather nasty little frisbee, cause those edges are sharp.

And one of the things that the library has committed itself to doing from its very beginning is keeping stuff readable. You know, you index things so that people can find it years later. You spread your grasp out, you expand what you do, you make new friends, you come up with new tools so that people can access the material that you've got.

And to do that, in 1980, the Lister Hill Building where we are standing, sitting, is located. And it's great, now I have all these people that come and visit 'cause I get to see a lot of our visitors and they say like, “Wow where do they put the books in that building?" [Image of Lister Hill Center, captioned R&D: The Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications (1980).]

Well you know, a funny thing about that. And of course, ah I told you you would see yourself. Of course what...[laughter] [Image of Dr. Lindberg, captioned Donald A.B. Lindberg, Director, 1984-present.]

Marty Cummings actually solved that problem for you, you're okay, we're good with that. So what we are poised for now is to be not just a National Library of Medicine, not just an International Library of Medicine, but a library of medicine in every sense of that word, a virtual library, a bricks and mortar library, a library that continues to do research in order to be on the cutting edge, whatever comes next, and yet we don’t forget where we come from.

So, celebrating our hundred and seventy-fifth, we can look at all the stuff that we can do, all the stuff that we have been doing for a very long time, all the stuff that we have been doing for a very long time, the stuff that we've just started doing, and give ourselves a pat on the back because we really do deserve one.

This is another picture of dawn, obviously this picture was just taken within the last few weeks, but that's the nicest part about being here for the library, it is always the dawn of something new. So thank you all for listening.  [Image of Healing Totem installed in NLM's front herb garden.]

[Applause]

I can probably answer questions if anybody...yes.

Audience member 1: How did the Depression affect the library? Did it affect people's attitudes towards investments towards the library, I figure, that's a good model for perhaps the dry patch we're wandering through?

Dr. Greenberg: Oh, I am going to hang myself on this one. Um, the history of the library, the standard history, which is the Wyndham Miles history of the library, um, doesn't really talk an awful lot about budget and that issue, and of course we were poised differently, the library was kind of cheaper to run because we were part of the army; so I have not really run across an awful lot of stuff, going like oh, woe is me, you know.

But then again, I haven't really done a comprehensive search to look for it. We have the archives here, we could do that, but it's not something, um, but I have to say that...this, whatever you want to call it, seems to be a lot harder on the library than the Depression was, but that's shooting from the hip. Yes, Mike.

Mike Sappol: Yeah I can, I can add to that. During the 1930s it was [?] of a plan to build a national library on the mall, uh, near the Library of Congress and they have lots of uh, architects’ drawings of what that building might look like and it was very different.

And one of the differences, is that, the response of the government to the Great Depression was to increase federal spending. It was a time when there was investment in  infrastructure, both in building of roads and also a time when building up of the federal government, to serve in various ways, is completely different ideology and response at that time.

Dr. Greenberg: Yeah, there was in interesting article in the New Yorker just a couple weeks ago about what John Maynard Keynes would think of the great whatever- this-is, whether we would say spend more money, but you know, Mike is absolutely right, the rules were much different back then,

but I am thinking outside of the library, I know a whole lot of organizations now that are virtually shutting their doors and that I don’t get a sense that that was going on in the thirties. Sir?

Audience member 2: Tell us what you remember about this building that we are in right now, I can recall the first time that we did two-way TV with Russia, Shasov and Debakey, and then with China...the translator booths upstairs and the wonderful little button-pushing things we have. That was kind of an interesting achievement in itself, wasn't it.

Dr. Greenberg: Well that's us, you know, it was the cutting edge. It’s funny, I got to meet Dr. Debakey only once, shortly before he died, I was down at that seminar in Houston and at one point, I guess it was for his 90th birthday, we gave him a brick.

When they knocked down the red-brick building, we kept some bricks and when the library wanted to honor Dr. Debakey, whose contributions to the library where huge, you know, what do you give to the man that has really everything, and the answer was that they gave him a brick, which I thought was kind of nice. Yes, Michael.

Michael North: Yes, uh, you mentioned some of those outside friends that we had, and you showed their pictures, and I know who a couple of them are, but maybe you could tell us who they are again and maybe which , uh, institutions they were affiliated with?

Dr. Greenberg: Oh sure, um, okay, Marcia Noyes was brought into medical librarianship by William Osler. One of the deals was that Hopkins would brought in this high-powered staff of people and some money and you know the original Hopkins faculty okay, Osler, Halsted, Kelly, Welch...

I'm missing somebody. Hmm? No, no he's later, he's later. Um, no that was just it, there were just four, that right.

Audience member: Halsted?

Dr. Greenberg:  Halsted for surgery, Osler for internal medicine, um, Kelly for ob-gyn, and Welch for pathology, okay they were the founding four, they were all supposed to do some sort of out-reachy sort of thing.

And um, Osler's job was to go out and build some sort of local library system and so he basically went into one of the Pratt Libraries and said," Who is the best librarian you've got?"

So, oh, there's this woman named Marcia Noyes and so okay, so basically they kidnaped her and made her the head of the library of the Medical and Surgical Society of Baltimore, another one of those medical societies who has sort of you know, just gone away and she was the guiding light, one of the guiding lights of the Medical Library Association.

MLA members, raise your hands. Oh come on, there are more of you out there than that. If you are a wonderful person and you work your fingers to the bone for about a thousand years, just before you retire, they give you the Marcia Noyes Award for a lifetime of service.

And see Margaret Charlton was at McGill and she was a medical librarian who was also involved in the early days of the that [?] association.

Louise Darling was involved in collection and development medical librarianship, the medical library at UCLA is named after her, I believe that there is a Darling Award also from MLA, is there not?

And um, actually Mike you probably know more about Gertrude Annan han I do because she was in New York.

Michael North: Yeah, she was the director of New York Academy of Medicine for many years and Janet Doe was also.

Dr. Greenberg: Yes, um and Janet Doe, it must be fifty plus years ago, did a descriptive bibliography of the works of Ambrose Pare, the sixteenth-century French surgeon, which is still the standard work, and I could have put so many more people up there but those are just kind of the ones,

I thought we had a fighting chance of some recognition on; Janet Doe Award, also um, from the MLA which is an annual lecture on the history of medicine by librarians.

But we've always had good friends and we've always worked well with them and it's kind of fun you read the oral histories of, especially, if you've got the time it's well worth it if you're interested in the history of the library, read Brad Rogers, Gertrude Annan, and um, Estelle Brodman, read them all in kind of quick succession because they are all basically the same timeframe.

And the ideas of, you know, there should be a National Library Loan system and NLM should be at the head of it. Dadada and it grows off to be DOCLINE.  So these are people...t's, it's a two-way street.

This is not the sort of thing you do by yourself.

Well then, thank you all for coming.  [Applause]