Population and metropolis. The demography of London 1580–1650

Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, his colleagues found it necessary to pass a rule that "no visiting chief could perform an autopsy except on a case from his own ward". Osler's enthusiasm for autopsies never diminished. Even as Regius Professor at Oxford, Osler could not resist the urge to roll up his sleeves and take part in a post-mortem dissection. The author of this book, Dr. Rodin, a former Professor of Pathology at the University of Texas, brings out these points well. The book consists of four distinct sections. First, a fair summary of Osler's career, stressing the many aspects related to pathology and describing in some detail his early visits to Europe to study the basic medical sciences with Virchow in Berlin and Burdon Sanderson in University College London, among others. This section also includes the long story ending with the final preservation of the fifty-five specimens which form the display in the Osler Museum at the McGill Pathology Institute, Montreal. Second, there is an assessment of the significance of these specimens in relation to medical knowledge of the time. Over half of the specimens are of heart disease. Although Osler did not make any new discoveries or conduct experiments in this field, he played a significant part in popularizing and developing current ideas on heart disease. The book refers to his Gulstonian (sic) Lectures on Malignant Endocarditis delivered at the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1885. The earlier intestinal specimens date from the time when the typhoid bacillus had just been discovered, so it is not surprising that his description of this disease does not mention this but concentrates on gross pathology. The third section of the book is a complete series of photographic reproductions of the mounted specimens; and the fourth section consists of Osler's autopsy records of ten of the specimens, taken from his original handwritten reports together with some of the clinical case histories. The text of this book is easy to read, full of facts and plentiful references. But for a book that calls itself an atlas of museum specimens, the quality of the illustrations is very poor, some of them being hardly recognizable even when accompanied by a detailed description. Most of the illustrations have been obscured by photographing the specimens in glass jars unskilfully illuminated. The book, though hard-covered, is badly bound. But these defects …