This may or may not be helpful, but I’ve partly achieved what the OP wanted by a combination of things at https://klezmonauts.co.uk, which is a library of musical scores in pdf form. The theme is Choices (which has an excellent portfolio built-in) and the plugin is Google Doc Embedder by Ken Davies. A little code tweaking was necessary to remove thumbnail images and excerpts from the portfolio items, since the titles were all that was required – as would be the case for a library of medical journals too, I expect.
Of course the PDFs in a music library wouldn’t be searchable even if they were searchable, if you see what I mean, so the approach here (which would work for the OP too) is to make liberal use of categories and tags, which can quickly narrow down the library visitor’s field of vision until they have a manageable number of documents in the specific area they want, which they can then easily and elegantly preview.
