Basic issues of the history of nutrition

with the surgeons Matthias Mayor and Cesar Roux, the ophthalmologists Marc Dufour and Jules Gonin, the psychiatrist Auguste Forel, and many others like A. Yersin (bacteriology), H. Stilling (pathology) and the historian of medicine Eugene Olivier. The latter's researches paved the way to the present work to a great extent, as the author readily acknowledges (pp. 9, 165). It should however be pointed out that a number of these celebrated scholars spent only a certain part of their medical career in Lausanne. A name that does not appear in this book is that ofWaldemar Haffkine, the renowned bacteriologist. He was not in fact connected with the Faculty, but spent the last years of his life in Lausanne and was buried there in 1930. The author, Guy Saudan, is the director of the Institut Universitaire d'Histoire de la Medecine et de la Sante Publique which opened in 1989. He gives much attention to the development of medical institutions, to teaching and research facilities, and, last but not least, to the impressive development of the past forty years (pp. 177-226). Several appendices contain detailed figures and names of the Medical Faculty, and there is a detailed list of illustrations but no index. Obviously iconography is of central importance-as it usually is in such works aimed at a wide public. The book's presentation and accuracy are excellent.