Book Notes

K. S. Grooss and B. W. J. Grob. Early Surgical Instruments; The Anatomical Models of Dr. Louis Auzoux; The Laboratory Equipment of Willem Einthoven: A Descriptive Catalogue. Museum Boerhaave Communication, no. 305. Leiden: Museum Boerhaave, 2004. 183 pp. Ill. €50.00 (add E15.00 for shipping) (90-6292-148-5).

This catalog differs from its three predecessors, all of which deal with artifacts in the Museum Boerhaave, in that it includes three "somewhat dissimilar groups of artefacts, whose only common denominator is that they belong to the medical sciences" (p. 7). The three sections are treated as separate catalogs, each with its own introduction and annotations. "Early Surgical Instruments" (by Grooss) includes an index of Museum Boerhaave inventory numbers and photographs of instrument makers' marks. The chapter on Dr. Auzoux's anatomical models (by Grob) contains sections on human anatomy and comparative anatomy. The final chapter (also by Grob) offers photographs of the string galvanometer (characterized as Einthoven's "magnum opus" [p. 161]), along with photographs of ophthalmological instruments and of instruments not related to either ophthalmology or cardiology.

The Editors

Walter Brown Shelley and John Thorne Crissey, eds. Classics in Clinical Dermatology, with Biographical Sketches. 2nd ed., Fiftieth Anniversary. Boca Raton, Fla.: Parthenon, 2003. xxv + 654 pp. Ill. $99.95 (1-84214-207-0).

Like its predecessor, published in 1953, this expanded collection presents portions of medical reports written between 1808 (Robert Willan, six entries) and 1990 (Grant Anhalt). The editors have organized their selected entries into five groups: "The Early Workers," "The Disciples," "The Golden Age," "The Expanding Universe," and "The Last 50 Years." Illustrations include those reprinted from original articles, portraits of the articles' authors, and a frontispiece entitled "The Four Greatest Dermatologists" (Robert Willan, J. L. B. Alibert, Louis Duhring, and Ferdinand Hebra).

The Editors

Isidore Snapper. Isidore Snapper's Notes for Memoirs, 1889–1973: The Autobiographical Recollections of "The Champion of Bedside Medicine." Edited by Mart J. van Lieburg. Rotterdam: Erasmus, 2004. 239 pp. Ill. E35.00 (paperbound, 90-5235-172-4).

The physician Isidore Snapper, renowned as a teacher and diagnostician, left on his death in 1973 a "chaotic collection of 369 pages combining first, second and third drafts, and filled up with notes, new corrections, deletions and additions" (p. 9). It is this collection that the editor has shaped into a largely chronological volume that "enable[s] the reader to follow Snapper through his course of a life that geographically covers three continents and chronologically extends to more than half a century of professorship in internal medicine" (p. 11).

Born in Amsterdam, Snapper received his medical education there, becoming professor of medicine at the University of Amsterdam. In 1938, "in the shadow of Hitler" (p. 139), he left Amsterdam for China; he came to the United States in 1941, moving from Washington to New York (Mt. Sinai Hospital) to Chicago (Cook County Hospital) and back to New York (Beth-El Hospital, in Brooklyn). As one of Snapper's students writes, "for those belonging to younger generations, involved either actively or passively in medical education, these memoirs of a great man and a great doctor should be a source of inspiration" (p. 27).

The Editors

Andreas-Holger Maehle and Johanna Geyer-Kordesch, eds. Historical and Philosophical Perspectives on Biomedical Ethics: From Paternalism to Autonomy? Ashgate Studies in Applied Ethics. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2002. x + 159 pp. $69.95 (0-7546-1529-4).

This volume includes essays originally presented at a Wellcome-sponsored interdisciplinary conference titled "From Medical Ethics to Bioethics," which took place at the University of Durham, U.K., in 1998. The contributors are Andrew A. G. Morrice ("'Honour and Interests': Medical Ethics and the British Medical Association"), Andreas-Holger Maehle ("The Emergence of Medical Professional Ethics in Germany"), Lutz D. H. Sauerteig ("Health Costs and the Ethics of the German Sickness Insurance System"), Cay-Rüdiger Prüll and Marianne Sinn ("Problems of Consent to Surgical...