why not have an index? (meme/complaint)

At work I've been doing research on "therapeutic privilege," which is more or less when doctors withholds information from a competent person because they think it will harm them or render them unable to make decisions. So I've been looking through a host of bioethics books, mostly using the indices. When I ran across a book that didn't have one, I complained to the cubicle and many people agreed -- all nonfiction books should have an index. That led me to remember this passage:

The dyspeptic Thomas Carlyle consigned the publishers of any indexless book "to be damned ten miles beyond Hell, where the Devil could not get for stinging nettles." The cause of indexing enlisted the enthusiasm of the great law reformer Lord Campbell (1779-1861), who half seriously proposed that any author who published a book without an index should pay a fine and be deprived of the benefits of the Copyright Act.

from Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers, 1983

:-)