Even the layman, today, realizes what great changes the 1960's have brought about in medicine—new insights into the processes of nature, new diagnostic tools, new therapeutic agents, new surgical approaches, new social concerns. But most readers do not realize that a century ago medicine was undergoing changes quite as profound. A recent symposium devoted to medicine and science in the 1860's makes this transformation extremely vivid and brings before us a fascinating sweep of history.
In this new volume, well edited by Dr. Poynter, we can perceive the medical concepts and activities of an earlier era, and their changes under the impact of new ideas and new discoveries. He can glimpse as well the ways in which medicine failed to change—some of the stubborn and parochial attitudes that have not disappeared in the century of progress.
Charles Darwin had published his Origin of Species in 1859, and his doctrines were