Martin Marc Cummings was director of the US National Library of Medicine. He was born in Camden, New Jersey, the son of Samuel Cummings, a livestock dealer, and Cecelia Cummings née Silverman, a housewife. He attended Haddon Heights High School, then Bucknell University and Duke University School of Medicine.
From 1942 to 1944 he served in the US Army Specialized Training Program. He was then an intern and subsequently an assistant resident at Boston Marine Hospital. In 1947, he became director of the tuberculosis evaluation laboratory at the Communicable Disease Center, US Public Health Service in Atlanta, Georgia.
Cummings then held several positions at the US Veterans Administration, serving as director of research services in Washington DC from 1953 to 1959. While at the Veterans Administration he also taught at several medical schools and, from 1959 to 1961, he was chairman of the department of microbiology at the University of Oklahoma’s school of medicine.
From 1961 to 1963 Cummings was chief of international research at the National Institutes of Health. In 1964, he was appointed as director of the National Library of Medicine. He retired from this role in 1983, but continued as a consultant and a member of the board of directors of the Council on Library Resources.
During his tenure at the National Library of Medicine, the organisation became one of the most advanced scientific libraries in the world, leading the development of computerised resources, including the medical bibliographic database MEDLARS (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System), which subsequently evolved into MEDLINE.
As director of the National Library of Medicine Cummings also worked to protect the doctrine of ‘fair use’ as applied to photocopying and disseminating medical literature, becoming engaged in a major copyright case which went to the US Supreme Court.
He also campaigned for the National Library of Medicine to became the backbone of a national network of libraries and worked for the passage of the 1965 Medical Library Assistance Act, to improve library facilities, collections, resources and personnel.
Cummings received seven honorary degrees and the Rockefeller Public Service Award among many other honours. In 1985, he became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.
Cummings retired to Sarasota, Florida, where he fished and continued his medical interests, including obtaining funding for an innovative programme for people with limited vision.
In 1942, he married Arlene (née Avrutine). They had three sons, Steven, Lee and Stuart, and a granddaughter, Jessica.
RCP editor
[The Washington Post 11 September 2011 www.legacy.com/obituaries/washingtonpost/obituary.aspx?n=martin-m-cummings&pid=153550029 – accessed 15 July 2020; J Med Libr Assoc 2012 Jul; 100(3):157-160 www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3411258/ – accessed 15 July 2020]