Laboratory Medicine: Clinical Microscopy, by James A. Freeman and Myrton F. Beeler, 395 pp, 160 illus, $16.50, Philadelphia, Lea & Febiger, 1974.
Here are two good, new, old-fashioned books. Well-organized, comprehensive chapters feature manual methods, step-by-step directions, and individual paragraphs about clinical interpretations. The eighth edition of what began, in 1936, as Bray's Synopsis of Clinical Laboratory Method includes innumerable procedures new since Bray's day—many new since the previous edition in 1968—but the audience is still the same careful, imaginative bench worker. New this year is a manual covering the catch-all realm called clinical microscopy—that often malodorous niche of the laboratory where tests are done on excreta—but the approach is similar to that of the older books.
The Bauer, Ackerman, Torro manual does as good a job as possible in trying to put all known knowledge between two covers. In 834 text pages there are nods to histologic technique, virus