There probably are that many worth reading in all, but remember I read in medicine as a whole with one particular disease as a touchstone and as stated, I read

There probably are that many worth reading in all, but remember I read in medicine as a whole with one particular disease as a touchstone and as stated, I read the abracts of 400,000 and took notes on over 100,000; so there were some worth reading, by no means all! It's amazing how much is published, and how no-one is paid to just go read and wander through them. If you decide to just accept the standard consensus view of any moment in time, that will of course be a remarkably narrow view compared to the actual empirical evidence and might be covered in a day, starting with Wikipedia 'cause stereotypes are like that. I was reading, of course, in order to avoid just that problem. Look at everything published in a month or week on a fairly narrow medical subject and lots of tangents from and to that, and your eyes will likely open wider, too. Very important studies are usually unexpected - that's part of what makes them important so we're verging on a tautology, there. So it's a matter of hindsight, in every field which contemporary articles are in fact "the classics." Your certainty and trust in current authorities broad knowledge and open-mindedness is a product of not knuckling down to read the abstracts of a few hundred thousand unrecommended journal articles - as well as a profound ignorance about the history of medicine. That history more than suggests that if you want quality>authority (of contemporary publications) you'd better start reading, and reading nearly everything.