Clinical Gastroenterology.

This is the second edition of this popular British text devoted to disorders of the gastrointestinal tract. Its scope does not include hepatic and biliary diseases. Heavy emphasis on clinical aspects is evident in early chapters. The sections on alimentary-tract symptoms, physiologic and environmental factors, and "anxiety and other psychoneurotic states" are excellent. However, discussion of evaluation of malabsorption syndromes is superficial (carotene and vitamin A do not even appear in the index). In the section on absorption and mucosal permeability, a series of disembodied photographs taken through a dissecting microscope and some jejunal biopsy photomicrographs are attended by remarkably terse legends, and there is no obvious reference to them in the text. In addition, there are no pictures of sprue (celiac disease in adults) wherein the jejunal biopsy is diagnostic.

The flexible fiberoptic gastroscope comes in second to the rigid Hermon Taylor scope—an opinion not widely shared by American