March, 1938 j REVIEWS 177

Reviews

TrS 0F THE BLOOD AND ATLAS OF HEMA-

nto WIT" CLINICAL AND HEMATOLOGIC

INW ,PT,ONS OF THE BLOOD diseases

TcL. D,NG A SECTION ON TECHNIC AND ][?RiVI I NO LOGY Unn.. * ?By R. R. Kracke, M.D., and H. E.

Qarver, M.S. 1937.' J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia and London. Pp. xviii plus 532

?ncluding 44 coloured plates and 17 other

"lustrations. Price, 65s. Obtainable from

Messrs. Butterworth and Company (India), Limited, Calcutta. Price, Rs. 48-12 I he hematological renaissance, which dates from the

important work of Minot, Castle and others on perm-

^ous anaemia and Witts, Mackay, and Vaughan on e

non-deficiency anaemias of women and children, ides an interesting study for the medical historian. 1 onie information might be obtained from a compara- tive study of the medical literature of ten years ago and

In , day. The successful book on hematology of the , generation was an atlas with a series of plates and

',1, clinical descriptions, but with little attempt at

assitication or systematic arrangement of the material f? J10 discussion on aetiology: in contrast to this, dunng ?e last, few years, two, at 'least, of the best books on

v.7 object have contained no plates, and the emphasis , s been entirely on aetiology, on which the present-

ly classification is based. . , iU rom this point of view the publication 01 the

1 esent volume is a retrograde step, in that it is an

matological atlas : it is, however, a modernized

namatological atlas and it will certainly fill a demand, en if this demand is not one that should be en-

^ed. The 44 full-page coloured plates are on the onif Yery satisfactory indeed. (The technical dim-

of iff 111 the way of the production of perfect pictures ,v ,j?pd cells are at present insurmountable.) It

iiai 11 easy to criticize individual plates ,or mdiyid- rln

? with such a vast choice, but if one picture sKofij1^ sati?fy one's idea of what the particular cell

u-no Vu k like, usually some other picture does. I his

, the reviewer's experience, with one exception; 110-

q^}"e did he find a really satisfactory megaloblast. mJ* classifications given are in accordance- with the

? , tendency, but the arrangement of the material the order in which the different disease syndromes

reaso CUSSed secrn t? depend more on chance than on

e .chapter on technique is useful. With the wide

h Pe 1?1' individual preferences criticism is again easy,

, ever, we cannot see eye to eye with the writers on

^ en- method of sternum puncture, for example, they

nf the use of a mallet to pierce the anterior plate \V

he sternum (they are tough, mighty tough in the

0f sn They recommend the withdrawal of 10 c.cm.

am

'

there is no difficulty in obtaining this

^ount, but it will mean considerable dilution of the

yarrow blood from the circulation, and we can think ho examination that cannot be done with 2 c.cm.

aj^. conclusion, we can say that the book is a useiul ^aition to the literature as it contains an immense amount of valuable information and some good plate,, of 1 n?t however recommend it to the young stuc en 0

hematology lest- it should lead him back into the

1 ̂cular paths that lead through fields of morpho- t)n?n? L^ti? and cell genealogy back to the starting

fin 1 : but we do believe that the trained woikei

h0QkVery xiseful addition to his laboratory refer-

?? S' L. E. N.