An Address on our Medical Literature

Abstract

WHEN I was surprised by the honour of an invitation to address this Congress, my first thought was that it must be declined, for the simple, but sufficient, reason that I had nothing to say that would be worth journal Articles 84 23 Ophthalmology .. Books iu 25 Theses Journal Articles 187 228 titollogy ..

WIKISTIM.org: An On-Line Database of Published Neurostimulation Studies

“…Dr. Billings, who was the architect not only of the field of medical library indexing but also of the original brick and mortar Johns Hopkins Hospital, saw this flood coming: “… if we go on as we have been going, there is coming a time when our library will become large cities and when it will require the services of everyone in the world not engaged in writing to catalog and care for the annual product” . What he did not predict was the advent of the virtual architecture created by computers and the Internet, which at once contribute to the explosion in scientific reports (we submitted our first online manuscript in January 2004) and opened the door to the possibility and indeed necessity of using computing power to corral the otherwise unmanageable stampede of medical and scientific publications vying for attention.…”

John Shaw Billings: creator of Index Medicus and medical visionary

“…Billings’ ‘address’ published in the BMJ in 1881 was based on his lecture to the seventh session of the International Medical Congress in London in August of that year. 2 At the same congress, Rudolf Virchow gave ‘An address on the value of pathological experiments’ – an impassioned plea on the value of vivisection. 9…”

“…The reference was to an article in the BMJ of 1881 entitled 'An address on our medical literature'. 2 I was expecting to find that the article was the usual (and usually ignored) plea to medical writers to avoid long words and complicated constructions, to write more or less as most people speak and to broaden their reading beyond medicine. I found that Billings' rules were sensible and admirably succinct: 'have something to say; say it; stop as soon as you've said it'.…”

“…The reference was to an article in the BMJ of 1881 entitled ‘An address on our medical literature’. 2…”

Why We Read

“…"There is a vast amount of this effete and worthless material in the literature of medicine, and it is increasing rapidly." He goes on to describe it as "superlatively middling, the quintessential extract of mediocrity" (9).…”