A medical bibliography (Garrison and Morton): an annotated check-list of texts illustrating the history of medicine

exasperating lengths. Another reviewer of this book describes the lengthy section dealing with the penicillin saga as "absolutely rivetting", and one can only concur in this assessment. In his final chapter Macfarlane discusses, among other things, whether Fleming was a "Great Scientist". In the view of the present reviewer the answer must be No. His published work was carried out with very simple and elegant equipment, but with some exceptions, notably the work on wounds and on lysozyme, it was often of a technical nature and contributed little to the store of scientific knowledge. And his discovery of penicillin was not the result of patient research based on his own and others' work, or on a reasoned search for the ideal antiseptic, or even on a random survey, but on a single experiment set up and completed by Nature herself. A brilliant and acute observer, which he undoubtedly was, is not the same as a scientific genius. Luck has played a prominent part in the penicillin story, as both Fleming and Florey have freely admitted. On a different plane, Fleming would surely have considered himself fortunate to have so painstaking, percipient and skilled an author for this, his latest biography. If "Garrison and Morton" did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it, so indispensable have the successive editions of this "annotated checklist of texts illustrating the history of medicine" become. A "G-M" number immediately multiplies the price one would expect to pay for an old medical book, but inclusion has also become, by common c6nsent, the equivalent of entry into the medico-historical Valhalla. To be sure, membership among the medical blessed need not be permanent, for items have been dropped as well as added, as Garrison's original handlist of 1912 has grown into the present volume of precisely 1,000 pages. Ironically, Fielding H. Garrison and Leslie T. Morton never actually cooperated in producing an edition of the bibliography. Garrison compiled two versions, the first in 1912 and an expanded one in 1933. Garrison died in 1936 and it was not until 1943 that Morton, then a young medical librarian, expanded Garrison's final list, adding the valuable annotations that summarize the significance of the individual items. There were further editions in 1954 and 1970. About ten per cent of the 7,830 main entries in the present edition are new, and more than five per cent of the previous edition …