Pulsatile Blood Flow

In addition to many overly restrictive simplifications of this type, the text offers some extraordinary and equally arresting therapeutic suggestions. In 1964, it is intriguing to discover that relief in pericarditis "is often obtained from the application of four or five leeches over the praecordium," that extract of ox gall may help the symptoms of acute hepatitis, and that "Kaolin poultices form a useful application to the cervical glands" in scarlet fever. The dietary recommendations of the text must be read to be fully savored. They include steamed flounder for breakfast in "dyspepsia", dry meals and between-meal fluids for "visceroptosis", and lemon and barley-water for "fevers". These therapeutic approaches may still be used somewhere in Britain, but an American student who proposes them on ward rounds may find himself seeking an internship abroad. Many of Dr. Savill's basic concepts are still vital and valid; his taxonomic reasoning provides many interesting and valuable features that are omitted, or not presented as well, in contemporary American texts. These many advantages make it all the more a pity that Savill's successors have not modernized both the construction and the contents of his book. As it stands, whatever originality and elegance the text might once have had is now negated by a pedantic, archaic presentation.