Essentials of Medicine

Euler, in addition to Dr. Gaddum, and there are addended commentaries by John Welsh, Andrew Wilson, and Maurice Tainter. Altogether this is a very useful and stimulating section. Walter R. Miles of Yale edits the selected psychomotor measurement methods and includes in this, the longest section in the book, methods for measuring physical work and strength, reaction time, coordinated motor response, manual dexterity, eye movement coordination, and motor tests of laboratory animals. Included in the list of authors for this section are Josef Brozek, Neal Miller, Walter Miles, L. P. Herrington, R. B. Ammons, H. E. King, and J. Clausen, and the Crawfords, among others. The fourth section concerns methods for study of peptide structure and is edited by Choh Hao Li. Here are to be found articles by J. C. Lewis, R. R. Porter, Henry Bull, Joseph Fruton, and Emil Smith. Most of the articles are directly practical and brief. The over-all editing performance is of good quality and the book is well indexed. References given in some of the sections unfortunately do not include titles of the articles, but each section has a fairly representative list of original sources. Naturally enough, the book suffers from the fact that methods covered within each section had to be limited to those thought to be most useful or most generally acceptable. The chief virture of Methods in Medical Research lies in its direction of attention toward the value of critical analysis of methods. One can even imagine the influence of this series of monographs giving rise to a more widespread practice of teaching the basic methods of research. This would in itself constitute a fundamental contribution to scientific development.