This is a meritorious if perhaps too ambitious attempt at furnishing in an almost unfilled field a chronological account of the foundation, classification, membership and geographic distribution of medical and allied societies throughout the world. One misses some historical background in the form of references to such forerunners of modern medical societies as the guilds of the Middle Ages, the colleges of physicians and surgeons chartered in Great Britain and elsewhere since the sixteenth century and, perhaps in a larger degree, the scientific academies which, beginning with the Academia dei Lincei in 1603, sprang up all over Europe during the next three centuries. It would be idle to expect under the circumstances any mention of the pioneer Society of Scientific Physicians (Schweinfurt, 1652), the Paris medical society (1776), the medical societies in Boston (1735, 1780), New York (1749, 1769), Philadelphia (1765), New Hampshire (1784) and South Carolina (1789), the societies