Medicine in Modern Times. (Macmillan.) — This is a volume or discourses
delivered to a professional audience, at the meeting of the British Medical Association, held last year at Oxford. Their interest is, as may be supposed, for the most part of a professional kind. In that respect, if we may judge from the eminence of the speakers, it is pro- bably of a very high order. But there is an interest of a more general kind in Dr. Acland'e review of the relations of medicine to other branches of knowledge ; as also in Professor Haughton's address on "Physics in Relation to Medicine." There are in this latter some very curious and instructive statements of the work done by the human body in the func- tion of producing animal heat, in mechanical work, and in mental and vital operations. The results are stated in the units of the weight of the body lifted through a height. The work due to animal heat, for instance, gives a mean of nearly six miles. This, in the presence of fever, is, it seems, increased a mile. As Professor Haughton says, "If you could place your fever patient at the bottom of a mine, twice the depth of the deepest mine in Cornwall, and compel the wretched sufferer to climb its ladders into open air, you would subject him to less torture, from muscular exertion, than that which he undergoes at the hand of nature, as he lies before you, helpless, tossing, and, delirious on his fever couch."
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