Our generation read medical journals as we used to read telephone books or encyclopaedias: we extract whatever useful facts are in them as efficiently as possible, without considerable critical reflection. This tendency is exacerbated by the pressures of professional life: those who are in a position to adopt the new scientific information presented in medical journals are also often those with the least time to ruminate on the nature of it. This is unfortunate for, as Dalrymple points out, “there is more in a medical journal than straightforward scientific truth, if only because scientific truth is itself often less than straightforward.”