At the time that printing came onto the scene in western Europe in the mid-1400s, the medical community was struggling in the depths of superstition, and little rational medicine was being practiced. With this new invention, a flood of ancient, outmoded texts was released upon the public, and eager readers frequently were unaware that books they were being sold as new works were actually in some cases a thousand years old. Added to this was the fact that the appearance in print of this irrational material lent credibility and authoritativeness to unscientific writings. Thus, in contrast to many other fields which were immeasurably helped by the advent of the printed book, rational medicine was in fact held back and prevented from developing for at least a full century. It was not until the Renaissance was well under way that important original contributions by such towering figures as Vesalius supplanted these worthless repetitions of ancient superstitions.

Europe↗

PubMed1971

Anton van Leeuwenhoek and the tooth-worm.

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Dental Caries↗

PubMed1971

Fifty years of the Index to Dental Literature: a critical appraisal.

The year 1971 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Index to Dental Literature. The Index had a slow and stormy birth, with twenty-three years of hard work put in until the first volume was issued. The first Index is described and the changes in its contents and format are traced through the years until its production in 1965 by the National Library of Medicine. The current Index is analyzed with attention paid to nomenclature, classification scheme, quality of the index entries and cross references. The results of a survey of regular users of the Index are interpreted, and suggestions gleaned for the improvement of this most useful tool in dental research.

Abstracting and Indexing↗

PubMed1971