Abstract
IN these reports Dr. Dobeli aims at obtaining from the natives of different countries concise statements of the advances made in medicine and the allied branches of knowledge, which have appeared in foreign journals, or in a more permanent form. He has obtained more or less full and detailed reports from America, Australia, California, China, France, Germany, Iceland, India, Italy, Java, Newfoundland, New Zealand, Portugal, Prince Edward's Island, Shetland Isles, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. The idea is a good one. The flood of periodical literature is so great that it is most difficult to keep up with the weekly journals of this country alone, and it becomes almost hopeless to do so with those of France and Germany. Such reports as those before us materially lighten labour, and the only objection to them is that a man who is working at any given subject cannot rely upon their being complete. The report on French progress by Prof. Villemin is a good one. That on German advances, by Dr. Alhaus is much too short. It might, with great advantage, have been extended at the expense of the excerpts from English writers. Everyone has access to the leading English journals, and, moreover, this part of the work is already well done by Braithwaite and Ranking, but comparatively few have access to Virchow's Archiv, the Deutsch Klinik, and the Wiener Medizinische Zeitung. Many of the English abstracts might have been condensed. We miss a Russian report. Yet both Russian naturalists and Russian physicians have journals of their own. On the whole the book is a useful one, and we can recommend it to our readers as containing a considerable mass of information which they will not elsewhere easily find.
Dr. Dobell's Reports on the Progress of Practical Medicine in different Parts of the World.
Vol. ii. (1871, Longmans.)
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Dr Dobell's Reports on the Progress of Practical Medicine in different Parts of the World . Nature 4, 140 (1871). https://doi.org/10.1038/004140a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/004140a0