The Story of a Plastic Surgery Library

Jerome P. Webster, M.D.

IF A statistician were to attempt to chart the growth of the Web¬
ster Library of Plastic Surgery with all its ramifications, it
would require a very complicated series of graphs on one chart
or several separate charts. One would have to portray the number
of books, reprints, portraits, association items, and also photo¬
graphs of patients who have been treated, kodachrome slides, mo¬
tion pictures, and artists' sketch books. All of these form a work¬
ing unit which may be used for the dissemination of knowledge
of the specialty of Plastic Surgery dating from earliest reported
history to the present day. It is obvious that in order to make
the library most useful it must be thought of as a whole and not
just a collection of books stacked away and only accessible
through the means of catalogue cards.

The statistician would probably begin with a sharply rising line
starting from a base line to represent my first acquisition of medi¬
cal books. These were textbooks on anatomy, histology, physiol¬
ogy, and physiological chemistry acquired when I started as a
caUow first year medical student. These handsome volumes with
gold leaf titles, glossy paper and countless illustrations, the cost
of which bit far more deeply than expected into the budget for
the first semester, had been selected with great care after con¬
sultation with those students who had been "through the mill"
in previous years. They had stressed the fact that any textbook
three or four years old was out of date, if a new edition had been
published.

The dotted line might then have risen to really tremendous
heights within a month after my medical career had begun, for
an older schoolmate offered to give me the entire medical library
left him as a legacy by his wealthy physician father. Imbued with
the idea that only the latest books were of value and faced with
the difficulties and expense of storing such a library for six or
seven years during the pursuit of Medicine without monetary
reward, I felt it unwise to accept this splendid offer. What literary