Put down the Starr report. If you really want the lowdown, something that will tell you almost anything you want to know about people, medical journals are where the action is. One of medicine's hidden pleasures is that while there is a fantastic amount to learn about human beings, most of it is already spelled out in some journal. In 1997 alone, the National Library of Medicine added references to 519,012 new articles from some 3,200 journals to its Medline database. The fact that all these journals can survive and multiply should be a clue that there's something compelling about them.
Subscribers are willing to pay dearly to keep their favorite journals going.
As a result, while The New Yorker lost millions last year, the scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out some 1,200 journals and made a whopping 40 percent profit on them. Moreover, behind the glossy covers and stilted prose, many of these little journals function as the gossip rags, the People magazines, for the science niches. It's how we keep tabs on what everyone is up to. But people should not let all the Balkanization and technical-sounding talk scare them away. Poke around in a few medical journals, and you're bound to find material as absorbing as anything you'll find in Vanity Fair .