Enzymes in Clinical Medicine

This book attempts "to present a comprehensive review of the historical, experimental arid clinical evidence for the rational use of enzymes as therapeutic and diagnostic agents." There has been much activity in recent years in this hitherto undeveloped field, and a critical review of new developments would be most welcome. The text is devoted, however, mainly to the author's particular area of interest, the use of proteolytic enzymes to reduce inflammation. Other therapeutic uses of enzymes and inhibitors and the use of enzyme determinations as diagnostic tests receive a brief and fragmentary treatment. The discussion of anti-inflammatory effect of enzymes is highly selective in that only those publications which agree with or support the author's viewpoint are mentioned, and the experimental and clinical studies which tend to show that proteolytic enzymes have little or no anti-inflammatory effect are ignored. The serious student of clinical enzymology will find, therefore, that the