Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Leslie Morton 1907–2004

2004; Wiley; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1471-1842.2004.00507.x

1471-1842

Michael Carmel, Shane Godbolt,

Child and Adolescent Health

A full 80 years of professional commitment and creativity. Surely no obituary can do justice to Leslie Morton's career and accomplishments? He was distinguished alike in his 'day jobs' as a leading medical librarian, in his creative involvement in professional affairs and in his work as a much published bibliographer and historian of medicine. He won both the Marcia C. Noyes Award of the (American) Medical Library Association in 1960 and the Cyril Barnard Memorial Prize in 1971—one of only two people ever to achieve this double. Honours continued to abound and in 1987 a special issue of the then newly launched Health Libraries Review, was published to celebrate his 80th birthday; in 1998 he was one of 100 librarians honoured with a Library Association Centenary Medal, presented by the Princess Royal and in the same year he was placed on the US Medical Library Association's centennial list of 'The 105 Most Memorable'. Yet it is surely for his wit, his courtesy, his personal kindness and his encouragement of several generations of younger librarians that he will be especially remembered. Leslie entered the profession straight from school in 1923 as an assistant in the Medical Sciences Library of University College London. He studied out of hours for his qualifications at UCL's own School of Librarianship (then still the only Library School in the UK) and chartered in 1932. After qualifying, his major professional appointments were at: The Royal Society of Medicine, 1933–35; St. Thomas's Hospital Medical School, 1935–43. British Council Medical Department, 1943–46; British Medical Journal Information Office, 1947–59; National Institute for Medical Research, 1959–72 (retiring for the first time, at age 65); British Postgraduate Medical Federation (Library Advisor), 1972–80 (retiring for the second time, at age 73) Even after his second retirement, Leslie continued into his nineties to deploy his considerable skills and voluntarily set up and organised a library locally at the Elliott Hall Medical Centre. He was deeply touched when a special ceremony was held naming the library 'The Morton Medical Library' after him. Throughout his career, he was creatively involved in professional affairs. In 1947 along with other distinguished librarians, including both W. J. Bishop and Cyril Barnard—after whom the Lecture and the Prize respectively are named—Leslie was a founding member of the Medical Section of the Library Association, one of the precursors of the Health Libraries Group. Over the years he held numerous offices in the Section and with the other founders played a key role in setting up and running a series of evening classes in medical librarianship, at the then NorthWest London Polytechnic, where a new generation of rising stars in the profession received excellent and inspirational tuition. In 1953 he helped to organize the very first International Congress on Medical Librarianship in London. Forty-seven years later, he addressed the eighth Congress on its return to London. In 1965 he was asked to join the MEDLARS Committee to oversee the establishment of online services in Britain, and so helped usher in the computer age in medical libraries. Leslie Morton was instrumental, with John Mills, in initiating the NHS Regional Librarians Group in 1975. Leslie and John had been appointed to establish regional networks in the four Thames Regions, and undertook a 'grand tour' of the existing systems to look for ideas and inspiration. En route they persuaded Roy Tabor—the doyen of regional librarianship—to call together a new group to co-ordinate action in support of library development at regional level. But it was in the field of bibliography and medical history that Leslie was uniquely distinguished, from the 1930s through to the 21st century. Early in his career he developed an abiding interest in the history of medicine. He became aware of Fielding Garrison's Texts Illustrating the History of Medicine in the Library of the Surgeon General's Office (1912; revised 1933). He recognized its great potential, but also its shortcomings, and he was determined to remedy them by compiling an augmented and annotated revision. He began the project in 1938 and completed it during the dark days of World War II. In 1943, it appeared as A Medical Bibliography. An Annotated Check-List of Texts Illustrating the History of Medicine (Garrison and Morton). Ever the model of probity, Leslie acknowledged Garrison's earlier work in the title, although by far the greater part of the effort was his own. The Check-List went through four editions (with additional printings), the most recent in 1983. Much of the work was done while he and his family were evacuated, with St Thomas's Medical School, to Guildford. There they whiled away many hours of the blackout, he working on his project, packing their crowded apartment with dozens of shoe boxes of typed entry slips. He tells the story in the Woodward Lecture he gave at Yale in May 1960, which Ash printed the following year in his Serial Publications Containing Medical Classics: An Index to Citations in Garrison and Morton. The bibliography was subsequently 'repatriated' (to the USA), and a fifth edition, edited by Jeremy Norman of San Francisco, was issued in 1991. Honouring 'the master', Norman titled it Morton's Medical Bibliography: An Annotated Checklist (Garrison and Morton). Publication of the bibliography gave rise to a cottage industry. In 1961, Lee Ash published Serial publications (mentioned above—with a second edition in 1979), and Frances Groen (then curator of the History of Medicine Department in the Falk Library at the University of Pittsburgh) indexed the bibliography's third edition as An Author Arrangement of all Monographs Listed in Garrison and Morton's Medical Bibliography: With Numerous Additional Cross-References. At the time, indeed, he was probably more widely appreciated in America than at home, and he was a frequently invited visitor and speaker. It may be significant that his Noyes Award was bestowed eleven years before the Barnard Prize. Although the Bibliography is Leslie Morton's definitive and best-known work, it represents just one part of his output. His first publication, in 1934, was How To Use A Medical Library (with six subsequent editions, the most recent in 1990). In 1946, he compiled World Medical Periodicals, with a second edition in 1957. His Use of Medical Literature appeared in 1974, with later editions through 1991. With Jean Hall, he co-edited Medical Research Centres: A World Directory (1983), and compiled, jointly with Robert J. Moore, A Bibliography of Medical and Biomedical Biography (1989; 3rd edition, 2004 [in press]). His last major work A Chronology of Medicine and Related Sciences (also with Moore) came out in 1997. In 2003, however, he completed work on a comprehensive list of the most significant British medical books through history, in preparation for an exhibition at the Royal Society of Medicine, and in the same year he contributed a short piece: In The Beginning—Library Networks in the Thames Region to Links of Future Past: A Story of Library Information Knowledge Services Networking, which was published by the London Library & Information Development Unit. What distinguishes all these works, apart from their insightful conception, is the meticulous way in which every entry was compiled, checked and rechecked. Equally important was Leslie's determination to ensure that credit is paid to precisely the right person every time. If ever a mistake was detected in one of his works—a rare event—and whenever a new development overtook an ascription or an annotation—as inevitably many did— out would come the pen and the slip of paper to prepare the correction for the next edition. No postponing to a 'convenient moment' for Leslie, he could not bear to take the risk of getting any detail wrong. The works, like the man himself, are an object lesson in courtesy. Leslie was very musical, an excellent pianist, and gifted with perfect pitch. He discovered this as a boy when his choirmaster asked if anyone could identify the pitch of a car horn sounding outside. Leslie's hand shot up—'E Flat, Sir'. Although his real love was classical music, in the 1930s, when the salaries of junior librarians were even worse than today, he somehow found time to play occasional gigs with a semi-professional dance band. He loved to play the piano into his nineties, and kept a baby grand well tuned in his front room. It was however tuned to pre-war concert pitch, as Leslie preferred the slightly mellower sound of pre-war to the 'brighter' post war pitch. One day a colleague was visiting with his teenage daughter who wished to share her own considerable musical skill on the recorder. Leslie instantly offered to accompany her, skilfully transposing every note to current concert pitch by raising it a semitone. Professionally, as well as musically, Leslie had perfect pitch. He could detect a false bibliographical note as readily as a musical one. He liked the mellower ways of the past but adapted with consummate skill to the sharper ways of the electronic age. Finally we must say that Leslie was all his life very much a family man. From his immediate family he derived—and to them he gave—a support and love which managed to be intense yet always relaxed and happy. Leslie Morton and Bertha Helena Shrosbree were married in 1933, and they celebrated their diamond wedding in 1993. She died on 7th June 1997 and, though this saddened him greatly, he kept going as energetically as ever. Leslie suffered a stroke on 16th February 2004, and passed away peacefully on 17th. Members of his family were with him that day. Surviving him is his son, John, his daughter, Margaret Ellison, three grandchildren, and one great grandchild. We are grateful to Valerie Ferguson, Margaret Haines, Mark Hodges, Bob Moore, Richard Osborn, Ian Snowley and Daphne and Freddie Sutherland for their help and advice in compiling the above.