| The largest medical library in the world, the National I.ibrary of Medi-cine near Washington, D.C., contains over 3.1 million items of medicalinfi~rmation in its collection. This international resource is an idealexample of the intbrmation explosion that has overwhehned all of us inthe latter half of the twentieth century. This book intends, in an entertaining way, to shrink this "informa-tion overwhelm" and focus on today s human body as well as on thehigh-tech medical technology that helps to keep it healthy. No claim ofcompleteness is made for obvious reasons. All medical specialties aregoing through constant and rapid transformation. There is no way tofreeze this change, capture a topic thoroughly, and keep it completelyup-to-date. Some 24,000 medical periodicals from around the world are sub-scribed to by the National Library of Medicine each year; and tens ofthousands of new books and other printed matter are added to thecollection annually, bringing in about 18 million new pages of mate-rial. This does not include the dozens of computer data bases thatprovide easy access to some 5 million references, nor does it includethousands of audiovisual resources. The total holdings of the National Library of Medicine amount tomore than 1 billion pages of medical information. If they were laid endto end, these pages could encircle the planet earth at the equator about7 times. No single human being, indeed no large prof;~ssional group ofscientists and doctors could possibly comprehend, retain, or fully uti-lize this vast depository of information. Certainly no one book ormultivolume set of books can do more than scratch the surface. R. R.Bowker s Medical Books and Serials in Print, 1984 lists some 70,000 booksand periodicals in its pages--just a heahhy selection of the total in-printliterature. If the amount of medical literature astounds us, it is nothingcompared to how the human body itself can boggle our minds. Just asthe quasar--that bewildering, superpowerful, billions-ol:light-years-distant cosmic nbject--is at the edge of human comprehension, so toois the human body with its microcosmic mysteries and its 100 trillioncells. |
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