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Allbutt once wrote a very searching essay on the historical relations of medicine and surgery. Sensible physicians agree that these relations should be close and warm. Thus, we welcome a work which tells the story of medical advances of the last hundred years from the surgeons vantage point. In this scholarly and delightful book, Jurgen Thorwald has made a story of surgical progress in the last hundred years, using the device of a narrator in the first person as an eyewitness of many notable events. The narrator tells of being an undergraduate medical student, a practicing surgeon, or a retired medical dilettante as the story requires. Though the book has the autobiographical impact of a story in the first person, it is based upon painstaking and scholarly research. The documentation is that of a scientific treatise or a genuine biography. The story begins with the author an undergraduate student at