POPULAR SCIENCE
THE ROMANCE OF MEDICAL SCIENCE, oe zero Pringle; Harrap. English YOMANCE" of the motion picture pattern and science make odd bedfellows. In this book, more than fifty pages are devoted to unscientific preRenaissance myth and legend. What our author calls the "medicine of the mind": is dismissed in three pages. But surely this is one of the growing points of medical science. The viewpoint that Pringle brings to his task is given further emphasis in a fulsome chapter on the R.A.M.C. Many of the illustrations are illchosen. For example, the plate facing page 224 could be of girls packing sugar. We are told it is M and B 693, by which Pringle means "sulphapyridine." This heavy leaning on trade information and trade illustratians is a weakness throughout the whole modern section. Half the plates, too, are portraits which, of course, are useless in advancing the theme. By contrast, the ‘ illustrations of an operation in 1840 and one today should have been placed to be visible at one opening. The impact would then have. been immense. The facts are here: inventions such as the stethoscope, microscope and Xrays; discoveries such as the germ theory, anaesthetics and antiseptics; men such as Pasteur and Banting. All that one could reasonably desire to know of the great struggle for health is here. Unfortunately it is so overlaid by trivial "human interest romance" that one is first cloyed and then annoyed. It is a pity that Pringle, with all this good ma‘terial so carefully gathered together, could not have let it tell its own story.
J. D.
McD.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 550, 6 January 1950, Page 13
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265POPULAR SCIENCE New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 550, 6 January 1950, Page 13
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