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When this reviewer undertook to evaluate this small volume, he experienced a disconcerting inability to categorize it. It is not a reference work, a teaching text, a practitioner's handbook, or a student's synopsis. It appeared at first to be only a book of lists, lists of conversational points, or semantic tokens. It is not a "how-to" book, nor a "why-because" book, nor a "what-to-do-until-the-consultantcomes" book.
After some difficulty, this reviewer finally realized that it is just exactly what it claims to be: a set of standardized lecture notes, suitable for use by busy attendings who must crowd an occasional lecture to clinical clerks or nurse-practitioners into their busy schedules of hospital rounds, office appointments, and housecalls.
The transatlantic origin of the work is apparent, most of all in the pharmacopoeia. Some of the names recall (with nostalgia) the occasions when this reviewer (doctor of medicine, 1953) would surreptitiously explore the