The Physician as Man of Letters, Science and Action.

Monro's compilation of brief biographical sketches of physicians who established themselves as highly talented men or as geniuses in nonmedical lines is a rich repository of miscellaneous information. This is a book for those who go into an old bookshop and forget what they were aiming for or escaping from. It probably should have been entitled "The British Physician as a Man of Letters, Action and Science," since reference to doctors of other lands is fragmentary, perfunctory, and illiterate. In the pages of this little book I discovered diseases bearing the names of saints, a Dr. Morrison who invented a telegraph in 1753, M.D.'s who achieved their most conspicuous fame as pirates or murderers, others who forsook medicine for the church or who went in the opposite direction, and a doctor who constructed (1) a wooden bull that bellowed, (2) an automatic dragon, and (3) a selfperforming lyre! Perhaps this