DETECTION WITHOUT CRIME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 782, 16 July 1954, Page 14

DETECTION WITHOUT CRIME

ANNALS OF MEDICAL DETECTION, by Berton Roueche; Victor Gollancz, English Price CHARMING bedside manner is very pleasant, but accurate diagnosis is the basis of the physician’s craft. Today the doctor has more diseases to look for; but he can resort to a growing army of specialists, especially if he is in or near a city. Uncertain what the patient has, he can whisk away a specimen to a laboratory, perhaps in the block where the patient lies, and get a solution quickly. The prescribed treatment follows immediately. If it is a notifiable disease, the’ Health Department is called in to trace the trouble to its source, and this may involve long and laborious investigation. Such is the theme of this fascinating book from America. It is something like the sort of sleuthing that Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke does, but without the element of crime. Here are real casés that came to American hospitals, and were diagnosed and hunted down. The first is trichinosis, a disease contracted by eating raw pork; and after the arrival of this book a similar case of diagnosis and tracking was reported from England. Some of the cases here involved as much patient spade work as one finds in a story about Inspector French. We have, among others, leprosy and smallpox, botulism and psittacosis, and a poisoning that arose out of an accident with restaurant salt cellars. Berton Roueche weaves the nature and history of these diseases, and the human element, into narratives which, as one would expect of reprints from the New Yorker, run smoothly but in lively style. Their scientific accuracy is to be accepted. Two of the chapters won a prize for medical reporting. There is also an account of the work in one of the great commercial laboratories where anti-biotics are made, and looked for in material gathered from many

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M.