International Society for the History of Medicine XXI International Congress of the History of Medicine

spontaneous generation of organisms, the work of Pasteur, and the two special Congress lectures, 'Recherche scientifique et personnalit6' (by Marcel Florkin) and 'Mathematics, music and medical science' (by Alistair Crombie). The papers were delivered in simultaneous sessions and while there was comparatively little overlap of biology and chemistry, this, unfortunately, was not so for some of the background information which made the Congress especially worthwhile to a medical historian. For example, information on an index of mathematical instrument makers (who also made scales and other instruments), trade cards as source material in the history of science (such cards are equally important for the history of medicine), and increasing interest in industrial archaeology (relevant to the pharmaceutical industry). The large number of papers will be published in due course (the formal colloquia papers have already appeared, published by the Centre International de Synthese, volume 89, Paris, 1968). With the International History of Medicine Conference, which was held a few weeks later, receiving about the same number ofcommunications, the problem of keeping abreast with, and assimilating, research into the history of medicine is becoming more and more acute.