摘要：The welfare of the world depends largely on the balance between inspired personal creativeness tending to cumulated wisdom, on one side, and a mechanistic autocratism, rejecting tradition, on the other. One has spiritual value and is always constructive; the second is deadly materialistic. We librarians and bibliographers might easily be counted out, if we did not strive for the kind of individual creativeness exemplified in the lives of such personalities as Jefferson, Daniel Drake, Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edison, William James, Mark Twain, William Henry Welch, Herbert Hoover-and, for librarians, you may choose between John Shaw Billings and Herbert Putnam. This being so, I chose for my subject here an outline of the creativeness of the last of the great medical encyclopedists, Albrecht von Haller. But first, as they say in television, let us consider our sponsors, the two library units which dignify the twin Kansas Cities.
