Anesthetics: Their Uses and Administration.

This is essentially a manual dealing with the practical phases of surgical anesthesia. The discussions of the physiologic aspects of the question are almost entirely concerned with the more superficial phenomena associated with the action of anesthetic drugs. There is almost no mention of the really fundamental disturbances produced in the cell. Thus, there is no mention of such important generalizations as that of Meyer and Overton, concerning the relationship of the narcotic property of a drug to its partition coefficient between fat and water, or as that of Verworn in regard to the association of tissue asphyxia with narcosis. The book, therefore, again calls attention to the fact that there is no adequate presentation of what is already known about the theory of narcosis in any of the numerous works which claim to present what is termed the physiologic aspect of the subject. There are, however, many commendable features.