VARICOSE ULCERS

sponsorshipof scientific journals is becoming a matter of someimportanceat the presenttime. The costsof printing and publishing are increasingat a great rate and some scientific bodies are finding it very difficult to meet the costs of publication. The journals of bodies like the American Medical Association in the United States and the British Medical Associationin Great Britain have such large circulations that rising costs can probably be met. The smaller societiesrepresentativeof different specialties in medicine produce journals of the greatest value to medical workers in all places. Some of thesesocietiesare hard put to it at the presenttime to make both ends meet. A general solution of this problem will be hard to find, but there is no doubt that in certain instancesjournals with restricted circulation which publish results of researchwill have to look for assistanceto the funds which in the first instance have enabled the research to be carried on. The author's point of view in medical journalism is best known to authorsand to editors. An author desires to have prompt and full publication, and in many instances,as Larkey declares, this is most desirable. It is the editor who faces the dilemma. On the one hand he has the author with his laudabledesire for publication, and on the other hand he has the physical limitations of printing and publishing. An editor's most difficult task is to know when to say: "No." No author likes to cut down the size of his article. Still it sometimeshas to be done, and it is surprising to what extent excisions can be made without any lowering of the value of the contribution. As a matter of fact if the pruning is done with care an improvementoften results. Larkey describesthe reader as the ultimate consumer and states that he, probably more than anyone, is overwhelmed by the mass of literature. The reader wants information for all sorts of purposesand from all kinds of places. Sometimes,Larkey points out, the reader is just trying to keep up with what is going on. Sometimes he is in searchof a specific fact and sometimeshe wants to bring together all the knowledge he can find on a certain subject in relation to his own research. Here the trouble starts all over again in a sort of chain fashion. The reader will now write an article and want it published. Larkey holds that in any of these researchesthe method is apt to be too haphazard-therewould seem to be almost a state of induced panic at the sight of the tremendousarray of journals or of the pages and pages of seemingly complex index entries. Larkey reproduces the following interesttngquotation. • What is to be the result of this steadily increasing production" of books? What will the libraries and catalogue" and bibliographies of a thousand, or even of a hundred, years hence be like, if we are thus to go in the ratio of geometric progression,which has governed the press for the last few decades? The mathematical formula which would expressthis, based on the data of the past century, gives an absurdand Impossibleconclusion,for it shows that if we go on as we have been going there is coming a time when our libraries will becomelarge cities, and when it will require the servicesof everyone in the world, not engaged in writing, to catalogue and care for the annual product. The truth is, however, that the ratio has changed, and that the rate of increaseis becoming smaller. In western セ オ イ ッ ー ・ L which is now the greatcentreof library production, It does not seem probable that the number of writers or readerswill materially Increase In the future, and it is in America, Russia and southern Asia, that the greatest difference will be found between the present amount of annual literary product and that of a century hence. Larkey must have startled his audienceby pointing out that the passagehe had quoted was not his own, but had been written in the year 1881. It was written by John Shaw Billings, the man who 'started the Index Medicus and the Index Catalogue of the Surgeon General's Library. Larkey referred to the scope of present-day medical publicationsand said that any figures he could·give would be only approximations. He said that there were probably between 8000 and 10,000 journals devoted to medicine and the related sciences. A few years earlier The Index Catalogue had listed almost 7000 periodicals and serial publications. Larkey thought a conservative estimate would be that something like 200,000 articles were published annually in thesejournals. It used to be said some years ago by a prominent Australian surgeon that probably two-thirds of all the articles published in medical journals need not be printed. From some points of view this would probably be correct. It is, however, necessary to consider where a journal is published and what circle of readers it serves. Members of scientific societies like to know that the proceedingsof their body are recorded somewhere-theplace of recording need not be in a journal which is the property of the society. This view is justified when we remember' that any original observation, howeverunimportantit may appearto be, may, when linked to some other seemingly unimportant observation, prove of value to somebody else who is working on the subject. Medical journals, of course,have other functions; in editorial and correspondencecolumnsthey give information to and sometimesinstruct their readersand galvanize them into action. In other words, if on the one hand they bring knowledge that w1ll relieve suffering, on the other hand they act as stimuli to the somnolent. And this remindsus of the old definition of a newspaper'smissionto comfort the affiicted and to affiict the comfortable.