Frances K. Widmann

The Distribution of the Human Blood Groups and Other Polymorphisms

ABSTRACT In publishing this monumental reference, Oxford Press and Professor Mourant and his associates have saved many researchers countless hours of literature search. There are 661 pages of tabulated data and 68 pages of bibliography, not including the republication of the complete monograph The ABO Blood Groups by the same authors, first published by Blackwells in 1958.Most readers will head first for Mourants pithy summaries of all these numbers. Superb on blood groups, competent on proteins and enzymes, Mourant puts isolated and featureless population studies into a working framework. There is a separate chapter for each major blood group system and protein polymorphism, followed by chapters considering the blood group distributions in different geographic and population categories.Red cell blood groups are the major focus, especially ABO and Rh; haptoglobulins, transferrins, lipoproteins, and enzyme systems occupy a decidedly secondary position. Histocompatibility antigens and hemoglobin variants have been deliberately omitted. Essential

Clinical Laboratory Methods

Laboratory Medicine: Clinical Microscopy, by James A. Freeman and Myrton F. Beeler, 395 pp, 160 illus,

Hepatitis and Blood Transfusion

16.50, Philadelphia, Lea & Febiger, 1974. Here are two good, new, old-fashioned books. Well-organized, comprehensive chapters feature manual methods, step-by-step directions, and individual paragraphs about clinical interpretations. The eighth edition of what began, in 1936, as Brays Synopsis of Clinical Laboratory Method includes innumerable procedures new since Brays day—many new since the previous edition in 1968—but the audience is still the same careful, imaginative bench worker. New this year is a manual covering the catch-all realm called clinical microscopy—that often malodorous niche of the laboratory where tests are done on excreta—but the approach is similar to that of the older books. The Bauer, Ackerman, Torro manual does as good a job as possible in trying to put all known knowledge between two covers. In 834 text pages there are nods to histologic technique, virus

Autoimmunity and Disease

These proceedings of a symposium held at the University of California, San Francisco, are unusual in two respects: only five months elapsed between presentation and publication, and the published volume is really worthwhile. The well-planned program managed to avoid repetition without stifling controversy in the broad fields of hepatitis B, its epidemiology, its antigens (for which the preferred designation is HB Ag, not Australia antigen or hepatitis-associated antigen), its antibodies, and the viruses involved. Rapid publication seems to have precluded an index, and required a typewritten format, but in such a rapidly changing area, these shortcuts are surely justified. Not surprisingly, the papers raise more questions than they answer. Those responsible for the work give state-of-the-art reports on the immunologic, physicochemical, and ultrastructural features of HB Ag, and the section on candidate viruses is suitably speculative. Fairly general agreement exists on the clinical, histologic, and certain epidemiologic features of the

Administration and Supervision in Laboratory Medicine

So rapid is the progress in the fields of immunity and autoimmune diseases that the general reader, if he merely stands still, is in fact falling behind by leaps and bounds. Consequently, this new book from England fills a real need. The authors have assembled and organized an enormous group of studies, some isolated, some interrelated, and have produced a coherent, comprehensive review of the present status of autoimmune mechanisms and their actual or possible relationship to many disease states. The first section summarizes the theoretical problems of immunity in general and autoimmunity in particular, giving an unusually lucid account of the protein chemistry involved. Detailed and perceptive discussions of rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus, those classical embodiments of all that is puzzling in the field, emphasize the practical applications of basic science to clinical medicine. In subsequent chapters, the many studies relating to diseases of individual organs are