Biological Actions of Sex Hormones

313 personal effort as well as personal desire must be active if an effective program is to develop. A case is made to the end that effort be directed to improve health during the latter half of the lifespan of the individual and not to continue focusing all attention on childhood and adolescence. The author urges us to reconsider policy in connection with a constructive medical program, to recognize the fact that "nature has never permitted human editing or revision of her basic laws of life," and that there may be a hazard in promoting survival of the relatively unfit. To add to the quantity of humanity does not necessarily mean that we are adding quality. Emphasis is placed upon the fact that "an unenlightened po,pulation cannot be healthy" and that education, along with research, must be one of the "most significant tasks facing those concerned with wholesale or en masse preventive medicine." A plea is made for a better use of the periodic health examination of the individual and also for better examination. The Committee on Medicine and the Changing Order of the New York Academy of Medicine should be credited with presenting a most thoughtful and most thought-provoking treatise. The literature on the biological actions of sex hormones is enormous, and the organization of such a subject matter is difficult. Doctor Burrows has cited over 2,000 different papers or monographs in the volume and some of them are mentioned in several different chapters. A critical evaluation of the numerous reports is made no easier by the newness of the subject, the diversity of and in some instances impurity of the inciters (sex and pituitary gonado-trophic hormones), and the "zoological specificity" of response among the numerous species-even among the mammals. Doctor Burrows has overcome most of these difficulties. The book is well outlined. The first four chapters are devoted to the biology of the gonado-trophic hormones and the following nineteen chapters to androgens, estrogens, progestins, and sex hormones of the adrenal cortex. The subject matter in each chapter is carefully outlined and simply and directly presented. Tables are frequently drawn from papers cited to emphasize important or controversial points, and they add to the admirable conciseness of the presentation. The book, although primarily a review, is not free from comments by the author on interpretations of the investigators whose work is quoted. The author has reviewed the papers carefully …