Index Medicus

"Current medical literature of the world."

In our second podcast episode, Carrie and I talked about Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and highlights of the annual update. I also mentioned some of the history and how it arose out Index Medicus, and thought I’d share a bit more about that.

Index Medicus was started by John Shaw Billings, who oversaw the development of the Library of the Surgeon General's Office, which eventually became what we now know as the National Library of Medicine (NLM).

Billings was an interesting guy. He was a battlefield surgeon during the Civil war, a librarian (he was the first director of the New York Public Library), a building designer, and integral in the planning of The Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was also involved in the US Census.

For medical library workers, Billings’s most enduring legacy is his involvement in NLM’s precursor library and Index Medicus. It was published once a year in print, starting in 1879, and eventually increased publication to quarterly as the body of literature increased. Most medical libraries have long since weeded out their print Index Medicus. My current library still has print copies though, from 1879’s volume 1 through 1965. Photographic proof:

Index Medicus in print

Back in the day before online databases like MEDLINE, you would literally have to flip through the print books to find citations that were relevant to you, then track down the physical copy of the article - in your collection, through interlibrary loan - based on the citation information. (Also, hope you can read German and/or French, because much of early medical literature was not written in English.) With the advent of computerized bibliographic databases, print Index Medicus became obsolete.

List of abbreviations and journals included in Index Medicus volume 1.

print Index Medicus versus online IndexCat

Index Medicus is no longer in print, but is accessible electronically via IndexCat with citations linked to the NLM catalog. Another legacy of Index Medicus is the Abridged Index Medicus (AIM) list of core medical journals. That is no longer a filter or subset in PubMed - yet another casualty of progress.

Before Index Medicus, there really wasn’t anything that collected the published medical literature and made it discoverable, unless you did it yourself. Billings, in his work with the Army’s SG Office, provided the basis for what we have now on how to find articles. If you use PubMed (or similar), you can thank John Shaw Billings for making it possible.