The Mammalian Oviduct

tion of its preventive medical activities in the A.E.F.: Dr. Haven Emerson, ex-Commissioner of Health of the City of New York as Epidemiologist, and Hans Zinsser, Professor of Bacteriology at Columbia University, who was assigned to the main laboratory in France. The establishment of the Pneumonia Commission, which attempted to deal with the havoc wrought in the Army Camps in this country by disastrous epidemics of post-measles and post-influenzal pneumonia, was a step of major significance. Its members were largely recruited from the Hospital of Rockefeller Institute. In 1940, with the imminent danger of the United States becoming embroiled in World War II, the U. S. Army took a most significant step, which was to create this discipline as a speciality within the Medical Corps of the Department of the Army: "to develop the wartime Preventive Medicine Service in the Office of the Surgeon General, United States Army," by assigning to it Col. (later Brig. Gen.) J. S. Simmons, M.D., who afterwards became Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health. Almost at once Col. (later Brig. General) Bayne-Jones became his deputy and continued in this position throughout the entire period of World War II. It is our loss that reasons dictated by modesty or his own conscience or a necessary shortening of the text have prevented him from telling this final part of the exciting and informative story in which he played such an important role. This eulogy may seem a far cry from sentiments voiced by many young people today, who would apparently like to see the down-grading of any military activity whatsoever-especially those that seek to prolong the currently unpopular and to me unjustifiable war in which we now find ourselves engaged. But these are political decisions. With the down-grading of everything military as a generalization, the reviewer most heartily would not agree. If a physician has to serve in the Army, involuntarily or not, a most useful assignment in the dismal and tragic business of war is definitely that of helping with its preventive (and curative) medical aspects. Preventive medicine in the U. S. Army has a distinguished history, as recorded in the book under discussion. In this field the physician can at least try to do some good for mankind-good which is not solely directed to military ends. It is in this vein that I imagine General Bayne-Jones has written, almost as an introduction to the years following 1940 which marked the culmination of the career of this distinguished physician, medical scientist, and gallant medical officer, who served his country well.