The New York Review of Books 60 (2023), 11

In 1941 an ambitious Philadelphia pediatrician, the wonderfully named Waldo Emerson Nelson, became the editor of America’s leading textbook of pediatrics. For the next half-century the compilation of successive editions of this large volume advanced his career, consumed his weekends, and encroached heavily on his domestic life. Every few years, when a new edition was being prepared for the press, he would dragoon his family into assembling the index for him. He would read through the proofs of all 1,500 or so pages, calling out the words and concepts to be listed, while his wife, Marge, and their three children—Jane, Ann, and Bill—wrote down on index cards the thousands of entries and their corresponding page numbers.