reputation for themselves as surgeons. What drove them on was their constant and almost obsessive desire to go one better than their colleagues from the Eastern seaboard. They succeeded. And yet, at the same time, the more sophisticated men from Boston and Baltimore were themselves setting out to raise American medicine up to and above European levels. And they, too, succeeded. In this short bo...

himself a past President of the Royal Microscopical Society, covers in 379 pages the development of the light microscope since 1839, when the Society began. Six pages of Society history are followed by 10 describing the development of the European microscope manufacturing trade in the nineteenth century, and 8 pages introducing the reader to the catalogue. The remainder describe the 452 numbere...

It is rare that a publisher's blurb undervalues a book, but this is one such occasion. This is much more than a "rounded synthesis of recent scholarship". For the first time we have an integrated study of the multifaceted subject of the poor and the government in this period. It is enriched by a wealth of telling detail from the author's own researches, which are used to instil a note of cautio...

Renewing Europe’s Housing provides an extensive overview of contemporary housing renewal policies and practices in Europe during the last four decades. The subject is of high and still increasing importance. During the time covered by the book, housing and urban policies in most European countries shifted thoroughly. After half a century of unsurpassed mass housing construction and urban growth...

This book aims to give an overview of the key issues in public mental health. It is timely as many populations are suffering the depressing consequences of the economic downturn, interest in mental health and well-being by policy makers is increasing, and the recent World Health Organization’s Mental Health Action Plan moves this issue to the top of the health agenda. The book is structured in ...

Otto Loewi was born in Frankfurt in 1873, became professor of pharmacology in Graz in 1909 and laid the foundation of the theory of neurochemical transmission in 1920. For this he shared a Nobel prize with Dale in 1936, and in 1938, for being Jewish, he was briefly imprisoned and then expelled from Australia. He then emigrated to the United States where he spent the rest of his life. Loewi wrot...

Almost twenty years ago, I heard Stephen Wolfram speak at a Gordon Conference about cellular automata (CA) and how they can be used to model seashell patterns. He had recently made a splash with a number of important papers applying CA to a variety of physical and biological systems. His early work on CA focused on a classification of the behavior of simple one-dimensional systems and he publis...

The period 1700 to 1900 saw the beginnings, and the development, of the British Empire in India. Empire was not planned, at least not in the early stages. In a sense, it just happened. The first British in India came for trade, not territory; they were businessmen, not conquerors. It can be argued that they came from a culture that was inferior, and a political entity that was weaker, than that...

THE MOLECULAR CONTROL OF CELLULAR ACTIVITY. John M. Allen, Ed. New York, McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 1962. 328 pp. $10.50. To those "molecular" biologists who make even a feeble attempt to keep up with the current spate of symposia in their field, the names of the contributors to this volume will read like a list of old friends. It is unfortunate that their subject matter will be almost equally...