The Index Catalogue and Historical Shifts in Medical Knowledge, & Word Usage Patterns

Abstract

Faithful aggregated accounts of the advancement of science are invaluable for those setting scientific policy as well as scholars of the history of science. As science develops the scholarly communityiÌ s determination of the accepted knowledge undergoes shifts. Within medicine these shifts include our understanding of what can cause disease and what defines specific disease entities. Shifts in accepted medical knowledge are captured in the medical literature. The Index Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon GeneraliÌ s Office, United States Army, published from 1880 -1961, is an extremely large index to medical literature. The newly digitized form of this index, referred to as the IndexCat, allows us a way to generate faithful accounts of the development of medical science during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. My data looks at shifts within the IndexCat surrounding three disease entities: syphilis, Huntington's chorea, and beriberi, and their interactions with two disease causation theories: germ and hereditary, from 1880-1930. Temporal changes in the prominent subject heading words and title words within the literature of these diseases and disease theories corroborate qualitative accounts of this same literature, which reports the complex and sometimes oblique process of knowledge accretion. Although preliminary, my results indicate that the IndexCat is a valuable tool for studying the development of medical knowledge.