Among the demands on physicians to assure the public of good care is proof that care will be informed by an ever-renewed bank of knowledge. This demand and the profits in the market it creates have been driving up the number of postgraduate courses offered in the United States year by year. Will physicians eventually spend all their time trying to learn all that there is to know about everything with no time left to apply this knowledge to anyone's care? Presumably economic pressures will halt the trend at some point short of that academic utopia. Postgraduate education is costly;