John Shaw Billings: Civil War Surgeon, Medical Librarian, Founder of Index Medicus, and First Director of the New York Public Library

Abstract

John Shaw Billings was born on April 12, 1838, in Allensville, Switzerland County, Indiana, which was near the frontier of the European-American settlement at the time. His father, James, was from New York and worked as a postmaster and operated a general store. His mother, Abby Shaw, was from Massachusetts and a direct Mayflower descendant, whom Billings remembered for her love of reading. John Shaw Billings took after his mother in this respect and began to read widely as a child, including finishing Plutarch, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and other religious texts, as well as the works of James Fenimore Cooper by the age of 10. He was almost entirely self-educated except for some help he received from a young clergyman learning Latin in his early teens.