A physician seldom has time to consult the literature exhaustively when confronted with a medical emergency. The manual prepared by Drs. Cullen and Gross deals particularly with immediate treatment and devotes little space to diagnosis and later therapy. The authors discuss asphyxia and artificial respiration, oxygen therapy, circulatory emergencies, acute poisoning, local anesthetic drug reactions, head injuries, allergic disturbances, the severely agitated, convulsive and comatose patients and a few miscellaneous emergencies, such as gastric dilatation, burns and other heat injuries. A chapter dealing with venipuncture and another dealing with drugs useful in emergencies are included.
The selection of subject matter for a book of this kind is difficult, because the author must decide which illnesses fall within the province of his subject and which are, for example, surgical; among the medical illnesses he must select the emergencies from the less urgent. The authors have limited their field significantly; for example,