Selected Exercises for the Biochemistry Laboratory

tinent to our overnourished society. The chapter on chemical, physical, climatic, and occupationally related illness is also complete and useful. According to the preface, the aim of the authors was to provide "a bird's eye view of medicine." To which birds are they alluding? There is the duckling trying to absorb basic medicine in two six-week clerkships. There is the physically and emotionally exhausted young hawk preparing for boards after three years of carrying the full load of clinical responsibility. There is the old buzzard caring for too many patients with too many problems. Will these birds utilize such a text? Concern is growing on how to deal with imbalance in the education of "wellrounded" physicians in the face of explosive advances in medical science. Surely the answer does not lie in the production of ever-larger compendia. There are already available medically programmed computers that score as well as the average internist in diagnostic accuracy and better than 80 percent of physicians in correct prescribing of antibiotics. In this direction lies relief from the burden of access to data and its routine processing. Within a decade new medical students will probably be issued computers as now is done for students at certain of the more progressive universities. In the meantime, for my daily access to data, handbooks of medicine are portable, brief, explicit, answer most of my questions, and do not aggravate my medical epicondylitis when picked up.