Few federal agencies have prospered as greatly in recent years as the National Institutes of Health, the research branch of the U.S. Public Health Service. Every year, with uncommon enthusiasm, Congress approves larger and larger expenditures for the study of human disease. Already NIH has become the hub of an enormous research effort, and its program will probably continue to expand. The agency has grown so rapidly since the end of World War II that the prewar and wartime stages in its development are now almost forgotten. It was during the 1930's that NIH began laying the groundwork for its current research program. Before the end of World War II federal public health officials had formulated the objectives, worked out the basic organizational pattern, and gained the legislative authority for a great postwar medical research effort. Their far-sighted policy, carefully calculated to advance the cause of federally sponsored medical research, made it possible for NIH to become the giant that it is today. Creation of NIHBy 1930 the Public Health Service had achieved a proud record in medical research. Its original research laboratory, established by Joseph J. Kinyoun

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O RAL history, in spite of its recent and unprecedented popularity, is a subject on which American historians are astonishingly uninformed. More than a few of us have the mistaken notion that oral history is exclusively the function of local historians whose only mission is to amuse doddering old men and members of the D.A.R. Others, who should know better, believe that oral history is something new, an outgrowth of the new technology, completely dependent on tape recorders and other complicated gadgets. One has only to recall H. H. Bancroft's 19th-century interviews to know that these misconceptions are unfortunate and absurd. Today, oral history is increasingly in the hands of trained historians and is becoming more important as well as more popular every year.Just why so many historians underestimate the importance of oral history is something of a mystery. The answer probably lies in our common background. We are simply not accustomed to thinking in terms of oral evidence. As graduate students, we are taught to rely primarily on the written record and to question the credibility of word-of-mouth evidence. Such unequivocal training is entirely proper, for the best history is always solidly based on the written evidence. But the time has come to recognize that historians are "to some extent tradition-bound," as Louis Starr has delicately phrased it, "particularly when it comes to source materials." 1 While we cling tenaciously to our methodological traditions, the volume of oral history source materials is increasing at a staggering rate, and the output promises to increase rather than diminish.

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