Growth Diagnosis. Second Edition

disciplines of the physical sciences, and the precision of the law to the practice of clinical medicine and the interpretation of clinical evidence. His purpose is to cultivate "common sense" so students of medicine can develop appropriate "rules of evidence" for clinical problems. Although the book is ostensibly written for medical students, and first year students at that, the lessons taught are pertinent to all readers of medical literature. Dr. Murphy's general approach to cultivating common sense and to providing the tools needed to assess clinical evidence is to review concepts of logic and demonstrate how these are often violated in medical literature. He probes the concept of "normal" and shows how arbitrary such a categorization can be. He points out the pitfalls of interpreting data accumulated with inexact or imprecise measurements, or with conscious or unconscious bias. He demonstrates how often much of what we consider dogma is based on studies which have violated these principles. At the close of each chapter there are numerous problems with which the student can practice the concepts taught, and at the conclusion of the book is an ersatz scientific paper which has been written deliberately to contain many of the errors Dr. Murphy discusses. A line by line interpretation of the paper follows. The subject of Dr. Murphy's book, namely the application of logic to medicine and the need for clear and concise thinking in the interpretation of clinical evidence, is a very critical one indeed. The number of journals with which one is asked to be familiar has increased immensely while the number of really useful and valuable studies does not seem to have risen proportionately. The ability to cull out what is really useful and separate wheat from chaff is a vital skill for today's physician and also for today's investigator. Dr. Murphy has addressed himself very nicely to problems of cultivating this skill, but unfortunately the presentation is not altogether successful. The first section of the book is extremely lengthy and laced with complex words and sentences where simpler ones would have sufficed and made the points with considerably more clarity. I am afraid that the medical student who reads The Logic of Medicine may find the concepts proposed so difficult to understand that the book will serve an opposite purpose from that intended. Dr. Murphy is more successful in handling the concept of the "good clinician." He feels …