摘要：Due to the peculiar exigencies of publishing, this piece is printed after several issues of the new Index Medicus have made their appearance, but it is written on a South Carolina holiday at year's end, while the first issue is still in press; moreover, it reaches the Editor one day after the deadline set. There is even in this unremarkable circumstance a small object lesson on the sort of publication pressures surrounding the issuance of a current periodical index. Goodbye to the old Current List. Born almost twenty years ago, in the mind of Atherton Seidell, at the beginning of a great war, it served well in answering emergency needs in a "table-of-contents" format which was then a new and pioneering style. Modified and modified again, in expanded coverage, in the addition of crude indexes, in the profound changes of 1950 which saw it emerge as a major bibliographical tool in its own right, phoenix-like from the dying embers of the Index-Catalogue, it strove always to meet the expanding bibliographical needs of the medical community. In the past decade it published references to a million periodical articles; no other bibliographical guide to the current literature in any major subject discipline surpassed that record.
