RECENTLY while browsing about my auxiliary study which is much like a lumberroom, containing dusty shelves of books, piles of periodicals, motley caches of papers and clippings tucked away because they "might be of use some day," I came across a small box which held, among other odds and ends, a tied-up parcel of cards. They proved to record items relating to medicine —sentences, phrases, things that had caught the fancy or struck some chord in the memory or in the imagination. Some could even claim to be nudges in the direction of wisdom. In such miniature transcripts of the medical life Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept at the spectacle of things, as it has been from the beginning.
This little store of windfalls, dating back more than 20 years, whose existence I had forgotten, must have been formed with the idea of setting up at some time a