Clinical Allergy Particularly Asthma and Hay Fever, Mechanism and Treatment.

Allergy as a specialty in scientific medicine is comparatively new. Our knowledge of the subject is almost wholly a matter of the twentieth century. The rapid increase in this knowledge makes almost any textbook obsolete with the date of publication. Actually, however, but few textbooks have thus far been available; notably, the books by Brown, Balyeat and Duke. It is doubtful whether any of these has endeavored to handle the subject with the completeness from the point of view of medicine as a whole that is revealed in Rackemann's contribution. The book bears an excellent introduction by Hans Zinsser and the series of which it is a part has had the editorial supervision of Minot.

The point of view toward allergy has gradually changed from emphasis on an immunologic background to a biochemical conception. It seems possible that the early emphasis on immunology did more to confuse the matter in