ABSTRACT
Medical textbooks often begin with a concise account of key discoveries in the fi eld. In the fi rst chapter of the textbook Medical Microbiology (Greenwood, Slack and Peutherer 2000), for example, several of the important milestone discoveries in microbiology are set out. I quote one of these below:
Among notable events were: the discovery by James Paget (while a first-year medical student at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London) of the larvae of Trichinella spiralis in muscle during an autopsy (1835).
