Biology For Medical Students

This is an important and useful contribution. Important because the hospitals of New York City offer more than one-sixth of all interneships and residencies in the entire country, and useful to all those who are interested in this branch of medical education. Not only is here to be found an analysis of the various types of services offered by the different hospitals in New York City, but the importance of these services to the later practice of the physician is critically discussed. Among the interesting contents, beside the resources for interne and group education, may be found the history of interneships and residencies, the relation of interne and graduate education to practice, the preparation and training of the interne, the organization of the interneship program, and capacity of the hospital in relation to the quality of the interne-ship. It is interesting for us to note that among the individual medical colleges outside the city having the largest representation the Yale University School of Medicine is among seven institutions in this group. In this extra-urban group 103 institutions were represented. When we consider the great importance of this form of medical education it appears remarkable that so little actual data have been available until the present. This volume, therefore, is a signal contribution and should stimulate other studies in this field. This is a second edition of a book apparently first published in 1934 as a compendium of information covering the ground called for by the syllabus for the first M.B. examination required by the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. To this end, the first thirteen chapters are devoted to a presentation of the structure of typical living animals, ranging through the phylo-genetic scale from amoeba to rabbit. This occupies the first half of the book and is really nothing more than an amplified dictionary. Heaven help the poor student who is forced to memorize this deadly dull list of names. Many illustrations occur-the borrowed ones good, the original ones poor. The last fifteen chapters are aimed to provide a similar encyclopedia of plant morphology with so little physiology as to be negligible. Chapters on bacteria and some of the parasites of man provide the student with a further stultifying list of names. The final chapter on evolution and heredity is so brief as to be of very doubtful significance. In other words, this book is an outline for an encyclopedia …