Medical Books, Libraries, and Collectors; a Study of Bibliography and the Book Trade in Relation to the Medical Sciences

摘要

There are many books on the history of medicine, fitted to all types of readers from the teen age student who must be amused as well as educated to thereference worker who needs the encyclopedic tome and does not care if it is as unreadable as the telephone directory or the World Almanac. In the field of medical librarianship, on the other hand, there is only the standard work (the Medical Library Association's Handbook of Medical Library Practice) and a group of articles in the technical journals. Mr. Thorton's book is the first attempt at uniting the two fields in a single volume. As a first attempt it is naturally not without its flaws. In spots the synthesis reads more like a physical mixture than a chemical fusion. The style is pedestrian, and the very plethora of information presented leaves the reader with a case of mental indigestion. Truly, as Geoffrey L. Keynes says in the Introduction, this is "a semi-readable book."