REVIEW. 



The Treatment of Disease. A Manual of Practical Medicine. By Reynold 

 Webb Wilcox, M. A., M. D., LL. D. Cloth. Pp. viii + 1023. Philadelphia : 

 P. Blakiston's Son & Co., 1911. 



This "mamial" of over 1,000 pages lacks both the conciseness of a 

 handbook and the fullness and completeness of a system of medicine. 

 The author has attempted to cover too much ground and to discuss 

 diseases beyond his personal knowledge and experience. The value to a 

 general practitioner in the United States of the sections on "Nasha fever," 

 "Japanese river fever," "verruga," etc., , seems questionable, while to a 

 practitioner in the Tropics a more complete treatment of these subjects 

 is necessary. 



In the nomenclature of diseases the author too often falls into the un- 

 fortunate error of referring to the diseases according to the names of 

 the early describers of the conditions, rather than according to their true 

 nomenclature. Thus he describes Brill's Disease, Weil's Disease, Duke's 

 Disease, Friedrich's Disease, Gerlier's Disease, Milroy's Disease, etc. 



The use of "Anchylostomiasis" rather than "agchylostomiasis" is not 

 in accordance with the latest revision of the nomenclature of tropical 

 diseases. The arrangement of the subject matter seems logical and clear 

 for the most part. 



Of the modernity and accuracy of the subject matter little need be said 

 after noting that typhoid fever, which is now recognized as primarily a 

 septicaemia to be detected by blood cultures and secondarily as an infec- 

 tion of the intestinal lymph nodes, is to be treated, according to the 

 author, with intestinal disinfectants, etc., and then "If the disease is not 

 inhibited the first week of the exhibition of these salts, the problem is 

 complicated by the fact that the infection has become systemic j" and 

 again, in the section on "Beriberi," by noting the statement that "It is, 

 however, quite likely that rice is really the medium through which the 

 germ of this disease operates, because if cured be substituted for uncured 

 rice the disease disappears." 



The advantages of this textbook as compared with the more reliable 

 and readable "Practice of Medicine," by Osier, are so few as to make its 

 field of usefulness limited. 



D. G. 



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