Searching the Older Literature

The Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General’s Office (Index-Catalogue) is a multi-part printed bibliography or list of items in the Library of the Surgeon-General’s Office, U.S. Army. It contains material dated from the 1400s through 1950 and is an important resource for researchers in the history of medicine, history of science, and for clinical research. 

• Reflects the collection of a single library, the Library of the Surgeon-General’s Office, U. S. Army, and is not a bibliography of all existing material.
• Published in 5 series in 61 volumes from 1880-1961.
• Contains material dated from the 15th through the 20th centuries.
• Primarily journal articles, books, dissertations, pamphlets, and reports.
• Also covers newspaper clippings, case studies, obituary notices, letters, portraits, rare books and manuscripts
• Contains two sub-alphabets under each subject heading that lists books from A-Z and journal articles in a separate A-Z arrangement.
• Last publication year for journal articles is 1949 but represents only those articles indexed with subject headings from A-Mn.
  • 4th series is incomplete: ends with v.11, alphabet through Mn.
  • 5th series coverage ends with 1950 imprints.
  • 5th series contains no journal articles. 

IndexCat is a digitized version of the printed Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon General's Office, a multi-part printed bibliography or list of items in the Library of the Surgeon General's Office, U.S. Army. It contains material dated from the 1400s through 1950 and is an important resource for researchers in the history of medicine or science.

Link to FAQs:  https://www.nlm.nih.gov/services/faqic.html

IndexCat Fact sheet: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/indexcat.html

New Search Interface:

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/ma14/ma14_indexcat.html

To perform a search type the word(s) you want to search in the IndexCat™ search box. Click on the Search button. The database will also ‘stem’ your search words. Stemming removes suffixes such as ‘-ing,’ ‘-ed,’ ‘-en,’ and ‘s.’

Example:

• A search on “coughing” will also retrieve any results that include the word “cough”.
• A search on “pill” will also retrieve results containing the term “pills”.

IndexCat™ simultaneously searches Index-Catalogue, eTKeVK2, LocatorPlus^®, PubMed^®, and PubMed Central^®.

Once you enter a search term, the Index-Catalogue, eTKeVK2, LocatorPlus, PubMed and PubMed Central tabs will be displayed. To see your search results, click on the respective tabs. Search terms are highlighted in the results.

The Boolean operators ‘OR’, ‘NOT’, ‘-’, ‘+’, and ‘?’ may be used in your query. Using ‘AND’ is not necessary as IndexCat™ combines terms with an ‘AND’ by default.

To email or export records from IndexCat™, perform your search and select some or all of the 10 records displayed. Go to the next page(s), and repeat the process until you have selected all of the records that you want. At the top right side of page under Actions, is an option to either email or export the selected records. Underneath Actions, is a list of formats to export including HTML, TEXT, and XML.

The select records option is not available when printing records as all printing is performed by selecting File - Print in the browser.

Medical literature prior to 1950 must be searched by hand through print indexes. This guide provides a description and time period covered by available indexes.