Early Human Deoelopmenr, 7 (1982) 293-300 Elsevier Biomedical Press

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Book reviews

Topics in Perinatal Medicine 2: Perinatal perspectives Brian Wharton (Ed.) Pitman Books Ltd., London, U.K., 1982 L15.00, 187 +x pages

Essentially, this book consists of communications and lectures given in the course of the Golden Jubilee celebrations of the premature baby unit at the Sorrento Matern- ity Hospital, Birmingham, England, which are grouped in five sections entitled I. Problems before birth, II. Applied physiology, III. Therapeutics, IV. The futures, V. The Mary Crosse Memorial Lecture. It is clearly printed without too many mis- prints. This makes for something of a miscellany grouped around the central theme, some chapters being reviews, others essentially historical and others descriptive, but all worth reading, succinct and of interest to anyone who works with newborn babies. I particularly enjoyed Professor McCance’s account of early physiological work at the Sorrento, coupled with the reprint of the paper by himself, Winifred Young and Dr. Hallam on secretion of urine by premature infants (originally published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood in the early days of the last war), the account of bifidobacteria and breast milk presented by Dr. Rolles and his colleagues, Dr. Challacombe’s neat essay on some aspects of bile acid metabolism in infancy and John Scopes’ fifth Mary Crosse Memorial Lecture on necrotising enterocolitis. The chapter on the use of ketogenic diets in the treatment of epilepsy by Bower and his colleagues is out of place in this volume but useful to have, while David Hull provides a characteristically sensible essay on behavioural thermoregula- tion in the newborn and Sam Tucker describes his method of screening for hearing defects in the newborn using the auditory response cradle.

This book is not a bargain at E15.00 nor one that is worth buying for a permanent niche on the bookshelf, but it is very well worth reading and to do so requires no great effort and leaves the reader considerably the wiser and better informed.

Dr. Brian Wharton is to be congratulated on the quality of his editing and clearly the symposium on which the book was based was worthy of the occasion which it was designed to celebrate. It would make a good present for a neonatal resident from his chief if the latter could afford to buy and the former had the time to read it.

J.A. DAVIS

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