Durack's spoof in the Journal a few months ago said some amusing things about "the weight of medical knowledge," but it had a sober message: the ever rising flood of medical literature will soon overwhelm us unless we take appropriate action. Neither the problem nor the prophecy is new, of course. We have been living in an era of exponential growth of medical information for several decades now and yet have managed so far to cope, although not without increasing effort.But the journals continue their relentless proliferation, as do the volumes of symposia, transactions and other periodicals containing "original" . . .