In medicine, as in other fields of endeavor, one finds certain books that have made their influence felt for extraordinarily long periods of time. For example, Virchow, in 1850, and Roessle, his successor as professor of pathology at the University of Berlin, in 1950, both acknowledged their debt to Cruveilhier's "Anatomie pathologique du corps humain," which was published in 1829.
"Das Lehrbuch der speziellen pathologischen Anatomie," by Eduard Kaufmann, late Professor of Pathology at the University of Göttingen, is such a book. Two whole generations of pathologists have grown up within arm's reach of this book and have acquired the habit of "look it up in Kaufmann" whenever they have encountered a difficult case. Rare, indeed, is the lesion that Kaufmann did not observe and describe.
Kaufmann published the first edition of his book in one volume in 1896 and the ninth and tenth edition, which was the last he