This well printed and finely illustrated book, written by thorough experts, contains about all there is for the physician to know about diseases of the biliary tract. Beginning with the history of the subject and ending with the latest word on treatment, what is said, one feels throughout, is based on wide personal experience and is not mere "prattle without practice." The chapters on special topics by some of the other staff members of the Mayo Clinic, such as those on physiology by Bollman and on radiology by Kirklin, are also satisfactory.
Indeed the reviewer's only criticism is that in the effort to omit nothing the authors have indulged in a good deal of needless and confusing repetition. Chapter 4 (part II), for example, concerns "Chronic Cholecystic Disease," but later, in chapter 8, "Calculous and Non-Calculous Cholecystitis" is dealt with and the same material is to some extent gone over