摘要：THE pace of medical investigation and the enormous output of medical literature has increased the task of locating what has been written on any particular subject. The treasures of the least of our libraries would be as useless as the gold in a sunken galleon if you and all those who came before you had not found ways of making these treasures available. Like all treasure hunting, this has its frustrations. Just when you have mapped out what appeared to be an original plan for retrieving some important collection of the past, you find that someone has been there before you, or that the treasure, instead of gold, contains only "hydatids and snakebite," as Osler remarked of an Australasian journal in 1897.
