About the Publisher, Harold Goodman, D.O.

My name is Harold Goodman. I am a physician practicing in Silver Spring, Maryland. My practice of general medicine combines osteopathy, homeopathy, acupuncture and other drugless therapies. Besides my training as a physician I also am a graduate of the University of Chicago Graduate Library School (1977). I worked for many years as a research and reference librarian prior to graduating with a Doctor of Osteopathy degree from the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine (1987). During this time I became aware that the literature of natural medicine was being lost.

As a librarian I realized that the medical library community for a long time has, to put it diplomatically, considered alternative approaches to medicine to be quackery. Consequently, the great medical libraries of the world never took the trouble to collect this material. In addition, many of the natural medicine practitioners and their schools were marginal at best compared to the power of organized "scientific" medicine and their supporters ( drug companies, governmental institutions, institutions of higher learning, etc.). So when the accumulated wisdom of alternative medicine was presented in printed form (books, journals, pamphlets, etc.) there were few takers. Very few institutions collected this material. I have visited the great collections of such material in the United States at some of the colleges and national organizations. The holdings are frequently patchy at best. Much of it has been lost forever. New Medicine v. Old Medicine