PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY FOR STUDENTS OF BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE
By David Ingersoll Hitchcock '15, Associate Professor of Physiology in the Yale University School of Medicine. Charles C. Thomas, Publisher, 1932. xi + 18a pp. 26 figs. 14.5 x 23.5 cm.
During the past decade there has been a growing appreciation of the importance, to the physician and biologist, of an adequate understanding of the fundamentals of physical chemistry. In countless ways the reactions of the human body in health and in disease and its sensitiveness to changes in its environment are made understandable through the laws of this branch of science. To cite only two examples we have the remarkable sensitiveness of the body to slight changes in the hydrogen ion concentration in the blood stream and the apparent relation between cancer and the oxidation of cells in the body tissue.
To be of greatest service the study of this subject should come early in the student's professional training. This is in a way unfortunate for it puts another subject into the already over-crowded list of "requireds" for the pre-medical student. Professor Hitchcock's book, however, is admirably adapted to give the student an adequate foundation in the subject with a minimum expenditure of time. His choice of topics is excellent and his wealth of experience in the teaching and practice of physical chemistry as applied to physiology is shown in the clarity of his presentation.
The text deals successively with the gas laws, the theory of solutions, the law of mass action, buffer action, galvanic cells and pH measurements, adsorption and the colloidal state, membrane equilbrium, reaction velocity and enzyme action, oxidation-reduction potentials, the concepts of total energy and free energy, and the application of physico-chemical principles to the blood stream.
Particularly to be commended are the chapters on membrane equilibrium and oxidation-reduction in which a rather difficult subject is presented in the most comprehensible manner that your reviewer has yet encountered. Mathematics, the bugbear of so many students, is reduced to the minimum possible in the presentation of a necessarily mathematical subject. A knowledge of algebra and the ability to use logarithms are all that are required. The text does not pretend to cover more than a small portion of the whole field of physical chemistry and should be considered only as a foundation for more advanced study by those who are to engage in biological research. Its careful study, however, should be sufficient to make much easier the path of the pre-medical student as he progresses -through physiological chemistry, pharmacology, etc.
To date your reviewer has found but one serious error in the text. He would, however, wish for more problems of a less complex nature at the end of each chapter. The book is heartily recommended to students and teachers of the subject and should find wide favor among them. Its use, moreover, should not be restricted to the classroom for it is an eminently readable book and would make a worthwhile addition to the library of any practitioner who wants a brief, authoritative and understandable exposition of physical chemistry in its service to his profession.
