Advances in Reproductive Physiology

of the Lancet and the British Medical Journal. When issues were at stake, the former generally expressed the views of the specialists, the whole-time internists and surgeons, and the latter took a stand for the general practitioner and family physician. Some of the statistical data will make strange reading for people whose horizons of the structure of medical care are those of the United States. In 1962 only 7,000 of the 22,000 family physicians held any kind of hospital appointment. During the same year the 6,000 specialists, based wholly in hospitals, made nearly 300,000 house calls in consultation with family physicians-these in addition to two or three million such visits made by the family physicians themselves. At a time when soaring hospital costs are bedevilling the equable distribution of good medical care in this country, there may be a lesson here. For although the best care America can offer may be the best in the world, the attention John Doe can expect if he takes ill in the street cannot compare with the expectations of Tommy Atkins under similar circumstances. The book shows that among the more striking achievements of the NHS has been its success in the redeployment of medical forces. Between 1938 and 1964 the number of fully qualified specialists increased from 1,620 to 7,973 at the same time as the number of family physicians rose from 20,162 to 21,903-the latter group had, however, numbered some 300 more two years earlier. Is the "socialization" of medicine the only means whereby such redeployment can be achieved either in those terms or in terms of rural/urban distribution-or are there others? The book gives opportunity for countless other contrasts between the British system and any other for which the reader has data. Mrs. Stevens makes no such comparisons herself, although with a fair and critical mind she analyzes the success and failures, the shortcomings and inconsistencies of this compromise system the British have developed for British use. Her style is lucid and her prose readable, so readable that a book which could well be utterly indigestible is fascinating. All forward-looking people concerned with the role of physicians in this (or any other) society, whether they are hospital administrators, regional planners, teachers, or physicians themselves would do well to study it.