James Francis Ballard

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James Francis Ballard

While William Norton Bullard provided the impetus and means to collect and acquire incunabula, it was Librarian James F. Ballard who was able to carry out that design, refining and developing an already impressive collection through shrewd and knowledgeable acquisition. It was also Mr. Ballard who first produced a printed catalog of the Bullard Loan Collection and then went on to publish A Catalogue of the Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts and Incunabula in the Boston Medical Library(1944), to date the only descriptive inventory of many of the fifteeners now here at the Countway Library.

James F. Ballard was associated with the Boston Medical Library for an extraordinary 63-year period, beginning work as an office boy in 1892 on a $3.00 per week salary, then rising to Assistant Librarian and, finally, in 1928, Director. Over the course of his tenure, he set about building the Boston Medical Library collection into one of the largest and finest in the country. In 1921, he devised and produced the first edition of a medical library classification scheme, later adopted by other institutions in the United States and abroad—and still in evidence in the stacks of the Countway today. Arnold C. Klebs, the authority on medical and scientific incunabula, said of James F. Ballard, "He is a remarkable example of the barbarian neo-humanist, kindly, devoted and ever helpful, evidently an excellent administrator and boss, a keen sleuth after antiquarian treasures; rough and untidy for himself but meticulous if not pedantic for all entrusted to him, superbly self-made in a job that needs multiple inspiration from living contacts."

Ballard's long service at the Boston Medical Library brought him into contact and even friendship with many of the luminaries of modern medical history, including Sir William Osler, Harvey Cushing, William H. Welch, and Henry Rouse Viets, themselves all important collectors of rare medical works and staunch advocates of medical libraries. One of James F. Ballard's earliest recollections of the library was meeting Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had come to compare his own copy of Johannes de Ketham's Fasciculus medicinae (1491) with the copy of the Boston Medical Library now here on display.

Building a Collection
James Francis Ballard