This work is an example of the sort of short text for practitioners in which the Germans excelled in the period before the last war. It is authoritative, concise and well illustrated and contains enough of anatomy, pathology and theoretical considerations to make it understandable. Obviously, conditions in Germany during the war years and since have not been favorable for scholarship and its enterprises. The impact of the sulfonamide drugs, penicillin and the numerous other antibiotics which have changed the aspect of whole categories of disease does not seem apparent in this work.
The mention of the sulfonamide drugs and penicillin, in fact, is hardly more than casual, almost deprecatory and with allusion to the dangers of the so-called masking effect. There seems to be hardly any understanding that acute mastoiditis and its complications, for example, have practically disappeared. This applies, in part, to many of the other acute inflammations