In a recent survey of this series of developments, intellectual historian Robert Darnton surveys the ramp to our current electronic state of affairs, asking some of the same questions posed in this column and exposing many of the digital anxieties besetting scholars everywhere. While Darnton stresses continuity, there are some disjunctions as well. Thus armed, one finds the experience utterly different from that of reviewing data converted from earlier formats. The electronically recast Fabrica, for example, utilizes some of the most sophisticated software for viewing older materials, the Adobe Acrobat system. The graphical content, even on a fast machine, renders slowly, requiring considerable patience.
Printing is much slower, even when attempted in different modes and on different types of printers.
The Visible Human, if to some less satisfying than holding the original Fabrica in one's own hands, seems far more satisfying than the Acrobat reissue of Vesalius. It is not a printed book trying to be a scroll. Surely it is this, and especially so for retrofits of older materials. But, as the Visible Human shows us, it is much more. Once these new, expanded, distributed libraries become a reality, medical historiography, and scholarship in general, will change forever.