THE EMERGENCE OF SCIENTIFIC MEDICINE

This excellent book reflects great credit on its major author, Professor Roddie, and on Doctors Binnion, Connell and Hurwitz who have contributed special chapters. Though Binnion and Connell have now left Belfast it is an achievement about which the Belfast Medical School may justifiably feel proud. The editor of The Practitioner explains in a foreword how a middle-aged general practitioner requested a series of articles explaining the intricacies of modern physiology in as simple terms as possible, and how Professor Roddie accepted the challenge and with his associates contributed these twenty-four articles to The Practitioner throughout 1969 and 1970. Professor Roddie has bravely resisted the temptation to present only such aspects of the subject as might be immediately and evidently related to the everyday practice of medicine. He has engineered a presentation of a wide segment of physiology which should interest and stimulate the medical practitioner in a way no text written for the general reader or junior student could hope to do, and yet this clearly carries a message of the clinical importance of the subject both to the general practitioner and to the consultant in all branches of medicine. J.E.M.