Digital knowledge

David Anthony Rew,
Honorary Senior Lecturer and Consultant Surgeon, University of Southampton

Time erases knowledge, experience and wisdom. The transience of life, the breadth and diversity of human activity, the maelstrom of events which shift our focus, and our finite time and attention span as individuals, ensure that much is lost as we struggle collectively to progress. The flourishing of intellectual activity in the surgical sciences in the twentieth century and the dramatic progress in a host of technologies and disciplines was underpinned by the growth in medical publishing. In the disciplines allied to cancer surgery, each decade has brought significant developments and further subspecialisation. We need to capture and to archive knowledge such that older works have the immediacy of access of newer material. Our own publishers are now taking steps to digitise all of its own historical material into computer searchable archives by subject cluster (W1).

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