A History of the Nigerian Health Services

reproduced on pages 15-19, together with the answers received. We may add that this is a rare specimen of the acquisition of guided information so early as the eighteenth century; second, a passage on Astruc's share in forming a theory of reflex movement. The last biography in the present volume, which much surpasses the preceding ones in bulk (137 pages) is that of Xavier Bichat; a posthumous publication of a work written by Maurice Genty (1961), whose earlier and smaller contributions to the Biographies Medicales (1927-1936) we have repeatedly used with profit. Antoine Louis, the distinguished French mid-eighteenth-century surgeon, was strongly dissatisfied with his family name which could easily be mistaken for a forename. However, he would probably have derived delighted satisfaction from the elegant biography, included in the present volume some 180 years after his death. Of course, he should not be mistaken for his namesake Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis (1787-1872) who has achieved greater international renown through his introduction of statistical methods for the evaluation of therapeutic procedures. The fourth biography is of Pierre Desault, who is here compared (pp. 147-51) with his contemporary John Hunter. A pleasant feature of the book is the inclusion of detailed bibliographies following the voluminous references. They have been arranged as follows: manuscripts with exact guide to their location; printed books and papers; general bibliography of printed material on the subject; listed iconography. The authors must be commended for their scholarly and readable work and the publishers for the beautiful and richly illustrated edition.