Surgery and life. The extraordinary career of Alexis Carrel

John B. Blake examines the work of Billings and stresses the scope of the indexing and abstracting sources available prior to the foundation of the Index-Catalogue and Index Medicus. He concludes with an illuminating analysis of the bibliography appended by Billings to his M.D. thesis on the treatment of epilepsy by trephination. Genevieve Miller's account of 'The nineteenth-century medical press' is primarily concerned with the American scene. She emphasizes the dependence of American medical publishing on editions and translations of European works, and gives an interesting account of some peculiar features of book distribution in an expanding and largely rural society. Edwin Wolf 2nd in his 'Medical books in colonial Philadelphia' reminds the reader that a general library, such as the Library Company of Philadelphia, may have important medical holdings, in this case largely due to the collecting activities of the Logan family. Philadelphia was a focal point of the eighteenth-century American medical world and it is surprising that the Library Company has not received more attention from medical historians. His bibliography is particularly valuable for the amount of material listed which was published in non-medical books and periodicals. K. Garth Huston on The physician as bibliographer and bibliophile covers a wide range of interesting figures from Walter Charleton to Sir Geoffrey Keynes (not, strictly speaking, a physician), concentrating particularly on the latter and his many and varied achievements. H. J. M. Symons Wellcome Institute