Filing Systems for Medical Literature

To the Editor.—  We were delighted to see the recent article by Karl Singer, MD (241:1492, 1979), describing his use of the classic systems of Wintrobe (as reported by Fuller¹) and Ultmann² for filing medical literature.We want to draw attention to our own report on this topic, where we described a modification of the same filing system that increases its utility for beginners, especially first- or second-year medical students.³ The system we described is tied closely to a single textbook of medicine. The student does not attempt to generate a comprehensive list of topics but uses the chapter titles of the textbook, essentially without modification, as the titles of his file folders. All input and retrieval is then guided by the textbooks' index, which also serves as a cross-reference. Thus, the effort required to set up the system is small, and little sophistication is required of