A SHORT HISTORY OF MIDWIFERY.

By Irving S. Cutter and Henry R. Viets'12. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Co.,1964. 260 pp. $8.50.

The rigors of today's medical school curriculum and postgraduate training leave the physician little time for reflection on or investigation of medical history. Indeed, the average physician has probably reached the advanced age of 45 before the subject ever truly enters his field of vision. At this point he has seen remarkable medical advances in the fifteen or twenty years since his own graduation, and begins to wonder who in the past did what, where, when, and why?

If he begins to search for original literature, or even if he is willing to settle for synopses of the past, he may find the task difficult. Many such compilations have first appeared in texts or systems of medicine and/or surgery which are no longer published; or, if they are still published, these historical sections have been eliminated in the interest of space economy, or perhaps they are thought not to be germane.

Such is the chain of events that led to the publication of A Short History of Midwifery by Irving C. Cutter and Henry R. Viets. Dr. Cutter wrote the original historical introduction to a three-volume system of obstetrics and gynecology, edited by Arthur H. Curtis of Chicago and published by the W. B. Saunders Company in 1933. These volumes have obviously become of little use as a current text, but the extensive and well annotated historical review justly deserves to be rescued and published as a separate volume.

The development of midwifery is traced separately in England, on the Continent, and in America, through the 19th Century. A separate section is devoted to the conquerors of puerperal sepsis, the once great scourge of the parturient. Just reading the accounts of some of the obstetrical problems encountered by these pioneers, and considering the methods of management employed, is enough to blanch the cheek of the most intrepid.

The biographical sketch of Dr. Cutter, a Keene, N. H., native, who died in 1945, shows us a prodigiously productive and occasionally controversial man who puts many of us to shame.

The book is not light reading, but it is an excellent review and a valuable reference source.

Clinical Instructor in Surgery(Obstetrics and Gynecology)