Of all the evil fruits of war none is more certain—or more tragic—than famine. In World War II there was more systematic starvation than heretofore. In Germany it was organized into concentrations of misery with addresses like Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Auschwitz. Toward the end of 1944, however, the walls began to crack and an increasing trickle of human wreckage fled, or more often crawled, in search of food and help. The few who reached Switzerland found both in such frontier hospitals as at St. Gallen. With the final Nazi collapse the Swiss organized their Military Hospital in Herisau to accept some of the overflow from the flood which was engulfing France. The present book presents the findings and experiences obtained with 349 patients.
The book begins, appropriately, with a short but interesting historical essay on famine (by Salzmann). A group of chapters ("Klinische Kasuistik," by Hottinger) presents the