Making the Greatest Medical Library in America: Cataloging

A new online exhibition, Making the Greatest Medical Library in America, showcases a selection of 19th century pamphlets acquired early in the NLM’s history from the private library of renowned French physician Claude Bernard. The exhibition also celebrates the NLM’s work collecting and preserving the world’s medical knowledge. This post is the fourth and last in a series that expands upon topics explored in the exhibition.

In 1878, Dr. John Shaw Billings acquired a collection of about 300 scientific pamphlets from the private library of renowned French physiologist Claude Bernard. At the time, the collection of the Surgeon General’s library consisted of a few thousand volumes. Now known as the National Library of Medicine (NLM), this collection has since expanded to nearly 30 million items. With such a vast and growing collection, how is it possible to find what you seek?

NLM cataloging staff are busy behind the scenes working to ensure our collections are findable, accessible, and retrievable in the online catalog. In preparation for the Making the Greatest Medical Library exhibition, staff created or updated the records for each one of Bernard’s pamphlets and used a variety of tools to provide accurate title, author, and publication information as well as subject headings and item-level descriptions so users can quickly discover and access the collection of the “father of modern physiology.”

One of these tools is a process known as “authority control.” Authors, like Bernard, often publish under variations of their name or under a different name, like a pseudonym. Some authors share the same name with another. To facilitate consistent search results, catalogers establish a standardized form of an entity name, such as an author’s name, and create a name authority record that includes these variant names as well as details to disambiguate those with identical names. This form is then entered in bibliographic records as access points, or headings.

A lack of authority control can lead to confusion. For example, an initial search for A. Yersin’s 1858 publication “Note sur le Pachytylus migratorious” retrieved a record that included an access point for the author Alexandre Yersin (1863–1943), the bacteriologist who discovered the bacterium responsible for the plague. Yersin’s work is often confused with that of another scientist—his father, Alexander Yersin. Born in 1825, Alexander Yersin was a Swiss entomologist who died in 1863, just weeks before his son was born. While cataloging this title, a separate authority record was created for the elder Yersin, to distinguish the two authors.

Page 1, “Note sur le Pachytylus migratorious” by Alexander Yersin, France, 1858
National Library of Medicine #101748215

Like Father, Like Son: Namesake Discoveries in the Yersin Family
Image 1: Yersinia pestis, named in honor of Alexandre Yersin who isolated the causative bacillus of the bubonic plague in 1895
Source: NIH Image Gallery on Flickr

Image 2: Illustration of Yersinia mexicana, a species of mantis discovered and named after the elder Yersin, from Genera insectorum by Philogene Wytsman and Lee Hill Townsend, Bruxelles, 1902
Source: Internet Archive

Another form of authority control involves the use of subject headings. To identify the primary subject focus of a work, catalogers perform the two-step process of subject analysis. The varied subjects of Bernard’s pamphlets were most often determined by examining title page, headings, and the main text. Then, the subjects were translated into a controlled vocabulary to provide the same type of consistency offered by the name headings described above. NLM catalogers use Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) as a controlled vocabulary to objectively communicate the main topics of the collection materials.

Aside from the theme of physiology in Bernard’s volumes, the subject of Anura (order of the class Amphibia, which includes several families of frogs and toads) and more specifically Ranidae (family of true frogs of the order Anura), continued to leap from the pages and for good reason. During the 19th century, the frog was the preferred subject of experimentation for scientists and was prominently featured in Bernard’s writings and the works he collected. Bernard even nicknamed the frog the “Job of physiology” for its continuous tribulations and sacrifices in the laboratory.

For example, Georgian physiologist Dr. Jean Tarchanoff (published later under the name Ivan Tarkhanov) spent several years of his early career working in Paris with Bernard and other scientists to prepare for his professorship. Here, he conducted a review of previous studies on the communication of blood vessels with lymphatic vessels. By observing the results of injections into the blood and lymphatic vessels in the web of a frog’s foot, he determined the connecting canals between the systems did not exist as claimed in the previous studies. His review was published in the July 1875 issue of the Archives de Physiologie as “Des prétendus canaux qui feraient communiquer les vaisseaux sanguins et lymphatiques.” Bernard saved at least seven of the eleven works authored by Tarchanoff while in Paris.

Catalogers also used copy-specific details as tools to identify the provenance history of the pamphlets. Provenance investigation involves identifying evidence of the previous history of a book from the binding, inscriptions, bookplates, property stamps, and annotations to discover former ownership, custody, or location. These volumes in particular offer clues as to how Bernard used the pamphlets, how he acquired them, and how these ideas were spread.

In this case, identifying at least one of the previous owners was a simple endeavor as all 14 volumes contain a stamp of the name “Claude Bernard” in gold foil on the front cover, removing some of the mystery. This detail was entered into the cataloging record for each pamphlet (search the phrase: “binding stamped Claude Bernard”) so the full collection can be retrieved by users who are interested in dissecting the history of physiology research, scientific journal publications, and of Bernard himself. The records also include an access point for Bernard as a former owner.

The authors’ presentation inscriptions offer insight on how scientific ideas were circulated during the 19th century. A note is also included in the record for each pamphlet title that includes an author presentation inscription to Bernard. For example, Alexander Yersin was one of many scientists that sent his publications directly to Bernard. On the upper corner of “Note sur le Pachytylus migratorious,” he added the following inscription: “M[r]. Claude Bernard, hommage de l’auteur, A. Yersin.” Why would an experimental physiologist be interested in a publication about migratory locusts? Though Bernard’s interest weighed heavily on the side of physiology rather than on individual insects, his concept of “milieu intérieur” (later expanded upon and coined by W.B. Canon as “homeostasis”) was a major influence in the field of entomology.

Cataloging each scientific pamphlet for the Making the Greatest Medical Library in America online exhibition offered an opportunity to explore each volume in Bernard’s collection and discover a few connections among what first appear to be seemingly unrelated publications. Now that each title is findable and accessible in the online catalog, as well as in NLM Digital Collections, we invite you to take a deep dive into the collection as well and learn more about the fascinating world of 19th-century science and medicine.

Explore Making the Greatest Medical Library online and learn more about NLM’s work collecting and preserving the world’s medical knowledge in this series.