Recent Advances in Paediatrics –23

subtitle reflects the editors' belief that the most important use of a collection of medical quotations is " seeing, in brief, what views—of physicians and patients, of diseases and treatments—were held in other times and places. " They justify this new publication by suggesting that previous collections of quotations did not fully cover the growth of concepts of normal bodily functions and diseases over the past two millennia, did not always give a complete reference to the source, and, of course, have not been able to record more recent discoveries and thoughts. The editors compare the present collection to a mosaic with a still recognisable image despite only some chips being in place and the rest missing. They discuss their selection criteria in the Introduction and acknowledge that they may have erred, sometimes in one direction by omitting a quotation which should have been included, and sometimes in the other. There will be no specific criticism in this review on either count except to say that while it was very pleasing to find a mention of Axel Munthe, it was surprising to find that his comment on the rapidity with which the faculty of medicine in Paris invented a new fashionable diagnosis of colitis (to replace the old one of appendicitis, then being cured by appendicectomy) was the only entry on the subject of colitis. The editors confess that because of their own background, quotations relating to internal medicine and neurology may be over-represented, but they invite readers to submit their own favourites for a third edition, taking care to give full bibliographic information. Time perhaps for those who feel their speciality has been neglected to start writing in. The 3521 quotations have been grouped in perhaps 1000 topics arranged alphabetically from the " A " of Abetalipoproteinemia to the " Z " of Zollinger-Ellison Syndrome. Some topics are specific and contain only a single quotation, others such as Patient-Physician Relations contain many more. Within each topic the quotations are placed in order of date to allow a chronological overview of the topic's development. Confusingly, however, entries for one organ and its diseases may be distributed between a number of different topics with no direct cross-referencing between them; see, for example, Hyperthyroidism, Hypothyroidism, and Thyroid Gland. Some eponymous conditions such as Colles Fracture, Kaposi Sarcoma, and Sjögren Syndrome are listed under their eponym, while Wilson disease appears under Hepatolenticular Degeneration …