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Science would not have been possible without a particular form of communication, which itself has changed over the years. Why has science flourished in our Judeo‐Christian culture and not in others? We have very little idea, but certainly the Gutenberg printing press made the rapid dissemination of scientific work possible. For the first two hundred years of the Royal Society, science was the activity of the gentleman intellectual. In the history of infectious disease, the books and journals of the period 1840–1890 show how fragile science was, and how recent the present‐day scientific paper is. Fact and opinion were intermingled; there was no refereeing as we know it; there was total confusion in the meaning and definition of terms; the presentation of data was long‐winded, repetitious and illogical, with very poor tables and figures; and so on. The professionalism of science has occurred in the past hundred years; if we are not very careful, I think it may well be the last hundred years of science before a return to another dark age.