Library of the Surgeon General's Office
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The Library of the Surgeon General's Office was the institutional medical literature repository of the U.S. Army Surgeon General from 1836 to 1936 when it was transformed into the National Library of Medicine.
In 1867, the Library, along with the new Surgeon General's office, was moved to Ford's Theater, site of the tragic assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865. (The theater had been closed and remodelled in the intervening two years.) The new Office/Library site was taken over by the U.S. Army to house a cluster of important post-Civil War medical activities of the Surgeon General's Office. The most significant were the archive of Civil War medical records (essential for verification of veterans' pension claims), the Army Medical Museum (now the National Museum of Health and Medicine), the editorial offices for preparation of the multi-volume Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, and the Library of the Surgeon General's Office. When the Army's needs outgrew the capacity of the former theater, several of the units were moved in 1887 to a new building, Army Medical Museum and Library (known as "Old Red"), on the nearby National Mall.
In 1936, the Library collection was transferred from the control of the U.S. Department of War to the Public Health Service of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and renamed the National Library of Medicine.
