Foundations of Anesthesiology

have rendered a fine service in presenting us with such a carefully prepared resume of Starling's work and their devoted work will receive wide acclamation. The reviewer's only criticism is the lack of more biographical information on the main characters in this drama of experimental investigation. Sidney Patterson for example was working as a general practitioner in a small wheat town in Australia when his former Professor of Physiology at Melbourne, Sir Charles Martin, persuaded him to take a Beit Fellowship and work at University College with Starling. He became a most important member of the team and after the war, having married Starling's eldest daughter, returned to Australia as Director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. It is nice to be able to record that Starling's work has recently been confirmed in the intact human subject by Dr. Eugene Braunwald of Bethesda. In surveying any particular branch of medicine, the historian is obliged to go back to original papers and publications. In many cases there will already have been pondered over by his predecessors and some may have assumed their rightful place in the perspective of the history of the subject. But from the point of view of the practitioner within such a discipline, a look back at the work of the pioneers will, more often than not, widen his view of his work, enable him to grasp present concepts more surely, and may sometimes give him clues to further work which he may follow. So often, too, does the modern student become bogged down in a morass of technicalities, that a glance at the older simpler work may help to clear the way for him. Such a book as the present gives him the opportunity so to look back, while it will also provide the historian of anaesthesia an access to works not otherwise readily available. The authors of these interesting volumes are respectively Head of the Section of Anaesthesiology, and Librarian, at the Mayo Clinic, and the latter is already well known for his writings upon the history of anaesthesia. These qualifications give them authority to compile a notable anthology of one hundred and fifty papers on anaesthesia and related topics. They divide these into eight sections, the first of which, on Respiratory Physiology, ranges from Vesalius on Artificial Respiration in a Sow (1543), through Paul Bert's famous paper Gases Contained in the Blood at Different …