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Book Reviews461 he can establish a better civilian practice after the war. At one point he tells his wife that he is saving all his money for her support, but later he confesses he paid $600 for the best horse in the division and defends this by saying that he was offered $700 for it. Finally in 1864, when the South desperately needs doctors, he resigns his commission, pardy because of poor health and pardy because he has failed to be promoted to division surgeon. The reader will secure very little medical information from this book, which is printed in a limited edition of 450 copies. The author has achieved a good picture of the campaigns in the West, but he is unfortunate in that he ever heard of Dr. Cade. Elmer L. DeGowin, m.u. Iowa City, Iowa. Soldier in White: The Life of General George Miller Sternberg. By John M. Gibson. (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 1958. Pp. 277. $6.75.) the average layman might wonder why another biography of George M. Sternberg is needed, particularly since his wife Martha wrote such an excellent oneforty years ago. There is much to be said for having a more critical biographer than a loyal, devoted, and capable wife. In Soldier in White John M. Gibson has provided us with a sound, well-documented, and eminently readable story of a physician who began his medical experience on the battlefield at Bull Run and was captured by the Confederates, after the Federal picnic turned into a Confederate field day. Mr. Gibson has the wounded going by train to Charlotte, rather than Charlottesville, an error made in the earlier biography and perhaps excusable in a North Carolinian. Sternberg escaped and made his way back to Washington where he was to become Surgeon-General of the United States Army and a very distinguished bacteriologist, teacher, and scientist. Fortunately Sternberg was on the fighting lines and was spared much of the high echelon confusion which dominated medical as well as military matters in the Civil War. Such confusion seems inevitable in military medicine in a democracy where each war is started amid chaos, little improved with belated plans suitable for the previous war. But he saw military medicine from the top to bottom. Experience fighting Indians and living the lonely life of an army surgeon during the great western expansion of the country did not prevent him from buying a precious microscope with his own money, teaching himself the necessary details of not only the preparation of slides and the new science of bacteriology, but of microphotography in which he became very expert. Some of his microphotographs are still show pieces. He also mastered foreign languages which helped him at later international meetings, and invented an anemometer, only to find out Üiat somebody else independendy had patented the same device to measure wind velocity. He was more successful in his invention and patenting of a Üiermostat, making an automatic device in a mercury thermometer to make or break electric contact at a fixed temperature. This still serves as the basic model for most thermostats we now use. 462CIVIL WAR HISTORY Sternberg became a first-rate scientist. As a result of his energetic foresight he played an important role in establishing the Army Medical School which has continued to serve a very important function in peace as well as during times of war. Sternberg himself had had to be his own teacher and guide in bacteriology. He was the father of medical research in die Armed Forces. Policies and practices he set in motion still play an important role in the health of soldiers and reached new heights in the second World War where the major medical research endeavor of the whole country was channelled albeit belatedly into applied and basic investigation of public health and military medicine. It is very difficult to tell precisely what influence Sternberg had in the details of the brillianüy executed studies by Walter Reed and his colleagues in their dramatic unraveling of the mode of transmission of yellow fever. The two were close friends, sharing mutual respect and admiration. It is probable that many points not written into...

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