Rudolph H. de Jong

SI Units in Medicine: An Introduction to the International System of Units With Conversion Tables and Normal Ranges

The World Health Organization, at its 30th assembly in 1977, recommended adoption of the International System of Units of Measurement (SI) by the medical community throughout the world. While our European colleagues already have behind them several years of this modern version of the metric system and British medical journals introduced SI this year, American journals are just now awakening to WHOs call. American readers will profit from the Continental experience collected in this handy reference manual—a translation-revision of the 1976 German text, with normal laboratory values adjusted for norms reported in English-language texts. The color band arrangement is extremely useful for quickly getting used to unfamiliar numbers and units: green band covers the range of normal values, and the surrounding yellow bands bracket the extreme limits of normal. Values printed against the white background outside of these colored bands are considered beyond normal limits. For quick reference, tables of

Toxic Effects of Local Anesthetics-Reply

Most all we know about modern drugs was, perforce, gained from laboratory experiments. So it is with local anesthetics and their side effects. Few humans would wish to volunteer for studies that carry with them the threat of convulsions, however remote it might be. As Dr Moore must know, the efficacy of diazepam as an anticonvulsant in preventing and treating CNS reactions to local anesthetics was established not only by me, but also by Munson, Wagman, Lesse, Feinstein, Wesseling, and other investigators referenced in my textbook.1Animal species tested were cats, rabbits, rodents, and monkeys. Since all reacted to diazepam in a similar manner, it would seem that extrapolation to man was not an unreasonable step—all the more since not just lidocaine (as Dr Moore intimates) but also procaine, tetracaine, bupivacaine, and etidocaine reactions were reduced in both frequency and intensity by previous administration of diazepam. I

Pain Control in Obstetrics

Dr Abouleish, assisted by seven contributors, has put together a wellrounded text on pain control in obstetrics. The book is divided into three sections: anatomy and physiology of pain control in parturition, techniques of obstetric anesthesia, and care of the newborn. Throughout, there is laudable concern for the psychological impact of labor and delivery. The basic science section deals well with the altered circulation and respiration during pregnancy, and the way the cardiovascular system compensates for anesthetic blockade. Local anesthetics and their maternal and fetal effects receive particularly detailed consideration because of their importance in obstetric anesthesia. Other aspects of parturition are presented with an eye to problems of special concern to anesthesiologists/p vomiting and aspiration, amniotic fluid embolism, placental transfer of drugs, and complete care of the neonate. Perhaps the greatest strength of this book is the second section, where techniques of conduction anesthesia for parturition are discussed and

Statistics at Square One

Derived from a series of articles on elementary statistics published in the British Medical Journal during 1976, this inexpensive soft-cover booklet lays out major topics in plain, pithy language. The introductory confessional of the powers and the limitations of statistics is alone worth the price of the book. The text provides medically pertinent examples, rounded out by exercises (with answers) at the end of each chapter. In just a few neat sentences, the author differentiates SE from SD, an attempt at which most standard texts fail. More difficult topics, such as t tests, X 2 tests, and correlation-regression, follow, supplemented by powerful tools for nonparametric data management. Even the Fisher exact probability concept begins to make sense at last, a fine measure of this books pedagogical strengths. Calculations require minimal knowledge of algebra, while restructured computational formulas allow easy execution on simple pocket calculators; the appendix supplies adequate probability tables.