Guide to Searching the Index Catalogue of the Surgeon General

This database was created by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), with financial assistance from the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Science in London and other groups. It is based on the print Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office. U.S. Army, Series 1-5, 1880-1961. The database includes bibliographical records for articles and books in the Surgeon General’s Library, the precursor of the National Library of Medicine. Records for articles go back at least as far as the eighteenth century. The database is incomplete for the 1930s and after. For the 1930s and 1940s, consult the print volumes of Index Medicus. For the 1950s, use the database Old Medline which can be accessed at Yale through Ovid Medline or PubMed. Access to IndexCat is free to anyone with an internet connection.

IndexCat was created by manually keying in the entries from the print volumes. (The Medical Library has two sets.) No additional subject coding was provided. The print volumes list articles from journals in the Surgeon General’s Library by subject only, not by author. Author entries, interspersed with subject entries, in the volumes, list only books and pamphlets. These entries do not have subjects. Moreover, subjects change over time, and there is no mapping of terms. Therefore, you have to search by keyword and use truncation which in this database is a ? In the database, you can search articles by author. Database records supply the full citation, the subject, if there is one, and the citation in the print Index Catalogue.

Each of the first three series begins with A and continues through Z.

Series I: Volumes published between 1880 and 1895.
Series II: Volumes published between 1895 and 1916.
Series III: Volumes published between 1918 and 1932.
Series IV: Volumes begin in 1936 and end with Mh-Mn in 1955.
Series V: Published 1959-61, covering additional monographs only to 1950.

Search by Author  

Books are indexed by full first names. Articles are indexed with initials. It is best to truncate to get everything. 

To search Harvey Cushing:
Enter “cushing h?” in Quick Search, or cushing h? in Advanced Search, select Author Search and All of These from the pulldown lists.

Search by Subject

Use truncation liberally.
mosquito? retrieves a greater number of relevant articles than mosquito

In Quick Search, words are treated as Boolean.
Therefore, use quotes for a phrase, e.g. “twilight sleep”
You can use two search terms without operators in Quick Search,
for example plague “ san francisco”

 Search by Title

Use quotations in Quick Search or select Title in Advanced Search

Advanced Search  

You can specify a particular field to search or search two or more fields at once. 

cushing as author and
intracranial tumo? as keyword Use pulldown menu for As a Phrase.
This retrieves tumor, tumors, tumour, or tumours.

 Articles and Obituaries about a Person

Use Advanced Search. Try curie or curie m? in the Subject field or the Title field.
If you use the initial, select All of These in the pulldown menu.

 Relationships

Every record links in a hierarchy to at least one other. An article will link to the subject of the article, and a book will link to the author. Click on View Relationships, and then click on the arrow to see other articles under the same subject or other books and pamphlets by the same author. Thus in the example of “twilight sleep,” one can view relationships to see other entries under the subject Anesthesia, Partial.

 Search History

Retrieves numbers of hits for past searches. Click on Edit to redo a search.

Selecting, Downloading, Printing, E-mailing  

You can select results by clicking in the boxes preceding the entries and then clicking on the “Add to Saved Records” button. Click on the “Click to View” link to see all your saved records. From that page you can download, print, or e-mail your results.

Search Orbis to determine if Yale owns the book or journal.

For further help searching IndexCat, contact Toby Appel in the Historical Library at 785-4354 or toby.appel@yale.edu.