CLINICAL ASPECTS AND TREATMENT OF SURGICAL INFECTIONS

By Frank LA Mont Meleney '10. W. B. Saunders Co.,Phila., 1949, 840 pp., $12.00.

Older concepts of surgical attack 011 infection per se have given way in recent years to a two-phase approach, comprising (1) an accurate identification of the invading organisms combined with a laboratory determination of their susceptibility to specific weapons such as penicillin and streptomycin and (a) a direct attack upon the invaders with that antibiotic which has been proven most effective, supplemented at times by surgical drainage.

For many years during his surgical experience in Peiping and more recently at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, New York, Doctor Frank Lamont Meleney has carried on extensive clinical and investigative work on the advancing border of this new field, making notable contributions in determining the bacterial agents causing several obscure skin infections, in discovering the potentialities of zinc peroxide and bacteriophage for effecting their cure and more recently in presenting a broad investigative pattern of the dramatic properties of a new antibiotic "Bacitracin" in overcoming certain infections which have proven intractable to other forms of treatment. A treatise on this subject by Dr. Meleney published in 1948 was reviewed in the February issue of this magazine.

This year the author has folded this impres- sive work into the substance of a general text on surgical infections to which three chapters have been contributed by associates at Presby- terian Hospital. The chapters are arranged topographically and embody a thorough dis- cussion of etiology, diagnosis and treatment, supplemented by numerous case reports culled from the combined experience of the author and his associates. He has properly avoided the didactic approach to a subject which is un- dergoing such rapid evolution but wherever feasible has stated principles of treatment in a definitive manner which will be appreciated by some who have found the antibiotic kaleidoscope rather perplexing.