War is good for babies and other young children: a history of the infant and child welfare movement in England 1898–1918

have become an object of general concern and even acquired a certain fashionable notoriety particularly in the USA. The most celebrated of the new generation of mycotoxins so far has been aflatoxin. It was first implicated in diseases of domestic animals-turkeys and other fowl fed on contaminated groundnut meal, and subsequently cattle, pigs, and sheep-by veterinarians in this country in 1960. Since then, it has been shown to be present in various foodstuffs of animals and of man, and the story of control is not entirely uncontroversial. Perhaps less spectacular in their effects but equally insidious are the infections of animals and man caused by microscopic fungi, and here Dr Ainsworth elaborates the more specialized aspects ofmedical and veterinary mycology. Two ofman's common mycoses today are thrush in infants and the skin infections known collectively as tinea, or ringworm, ofwhich the best known is probably the Trichophyton infection favus. They were known to the Greeks and Romans; thrush was noted in the Hippocratic writings as aphthae, and the Romans. according to Celsus, knew favus under the name porrigo. These two conditions were also the first to be described and shown to be of fungal origin in papers published between 1841 and 1844 by David Gruby in Paris. Gruby was born in Hungary of Jewish parents, and having graduated in medicine at Vienna, he found his faith an obstacle, as did a number of other gifted early microbiologists, to obtaining an official position. Undeterred, he worked privately at his chosen subject, and Dr Ainsworth dates the beginnings of modern medical mycology from Gruby's papers, which he analyses at length. Equally seminal, and probably an influence on Gruby's work, was Agostino Bassi's demonstration of the fungal identity of the agent of the muscardine disease of silkworms in 1835. And it was in large measure due to these two discoveries that there was a tendency in the mid-nineteenth century to speculate on fungal identities for many of the disease agents which were later in the century to be shown to be bacteria, or even viruses. From these beginnings, Dr Ainsworth moves with authority through the development of medical and veterinary mycology with a wealth of detailed information on individual contributions from later major and minor mycopathologists who over the years came increasingly to include mycologists, microbiologists, and biochemists outside, as well as inside, the medical and veterinary professions. In addition to the many …