Speaker: Richard Gunderman
After conducting our required annual meeting and the election of officers for 2026, Richard Gunderman will talk about the impact of the life of John Shaw Billings. He was a Civil War Surgeon, founded the National Library of Medicine, developed the Index Medicus, founded the New York Public Library, designed Johns Hopkins Hospital, and introduced punch cards to the US census, laying the groundwork for IBM, as well as many other notable contributions.
Richard Gunderman, MD, PhD, is Professor of Radiology, IU School of Medicine. He is a Scientech Club member and past speaker.
Program: John Shaw Billings - The Indiana Physician Who Contributed Broadly to American Life
Speaker: Richard Gunderman, MD, PhD, Chancellor’s Professor of Radiology, IUSM, Scientech Club member
Introduced By: Marty Meisenheimer
Attendance: NESC: 89 Zoom: 23
Guest(s): Marge Elliott, Donna Holl, Mike Morone, Dave Simon, Barb Stohler
Scribe: Benny Ko
Editor: Carl Warner
Talk’s Zoom recording found at: https://www.scientechclubvideos.org/zoom/12152025.mp4
John Shaw Billings was a renowned polymath who left his influence on medicine, public health, library science, census, and medical publication. His accomplishment is premised on always taking the first step toward a goal. After that, he said, things have their way of getting to that goal.
Billings was born in the small town of Allensville, Indiana, in 1838. He loved learning from an early age and entered Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, at the age of 14. After graduation, he attended Cincinnati's Medical College of Ohio, where he earned his medical degree in 1860. He wrote a thesis on "The Surgical Treatment of Epilepsy", a concept that was considered far advanced for its time but shown to be prescient more than a century later.
He became an instructor of anatomy at the same medical college when the Civil War broke out in 1861. He served at various Army hospitals and was responsible for improving and establishing new hospitals to tend to the large number of war casualties. Under his initiative, ventilation systems, showers, and bathtubs were put in barracks and hospitals. He had personally witnessed war at the front, most notably during the Battle of Gettysburg, where he attended a large number of wounded at the battle for Little Round Top.
After the Civil War, he was placed in charge of the Army Surgeon General's library, where he served
from 1867 to 1895. During his term of service, the library collection went from 2300 to 12400 volumes, and was the largest medical library in the Americas. He also redesigned the cataloging and indexing systems to handle the increasing volume of medical publications. Eventually, this led to the publication of Index Medicus as we know it today. During this period, Billings also played a key role in the development of Johns Hopkins Hospital. He emphasized that it should not only provide clinical care but also advance medical knowledge through research, and that knowledge should benefit all individuals globally.
During the yellow fever outbreak in Memphis in 1897, Billings hypothesized it was caused by a "minute organism," a concept which later proved to be correct. He further emphasized the importance of sanitation, sewage disposal, and clean water supplies. Such public health initiatives led to the concept of preventive medicine as distinguished from clinical medicine.
Billings played a significant role in the national censuses of 1880 and 1890. To manage the large volume of data collected and turn it into meaningful statistics, he designed the punch-card system, an electromechanical approach to data processing. This was the forefather of the modern computer era, and it also led to the founding of IBM.
Billings’ contributions to the American people did not stop there. In 1895, he became the founding director of the New York Library. The holdings there increased to 1 million books by 1911. He persuaded Andrew Carnegie to fund additional branch libraries in New York and across the country, 2500 in total. Indiana, in particular, received the largest number of such Carnegie libraries.
In closing, Dr. Gunderman shared some personal thoughts with us. The vast increase in medical information needs to correlate with an increase in wisdom about how to manage it. Today, there is a need for educated individuals capable of addressing significant societal issues, and such leaders of high vision can only come from a sound education system.
Richard Gunderman
