:f /j/Q/94
                                          March 14, 1955

TEXTBOOK of MICROBIOLOGY, Sixteenth Edition.

  by William Burrows, with the collaboration of Francis B. Gordon,
  Richard J. Porter, and James W. Moulder, xix + 824 pp; ill.
  Saunders, Phila., 1954.

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     This volume is the successor to the fifteenth edition of Jordan-
Burrows Textbook of Bacteriology which appeared in 1949.  There have
been a number of changes in detail and up-dating, but the authorship
and general plan remains the same.  The book will doubtless retain
the same popularity for the teaching of bacteriology in the medical
schools as was enjoyed by its predecessors.
     It is becoming increasingly difficiult for any single person to
enjoy competent authoritativeness in so broad a field as
"microbiology".  The contributions of the junior authors are an
important concession to this realization in the fields of virology,
parasitology and biochemistry, respectively.  The principal author
must still retain the responsibility for an authoritative
presentation in such diverse fields as taxonomy, infectious disease
and immunity, genetics, biophysics and radiobiology, cytology,
epidemiology, chemotherapy, pathology and public health.  In exchange
for the certain advantages of a text with a uniform standard of
presentation, a treatment such as this must necessarily lose in
precision over some of the diverse fields mentioned.  Perhaps this
will account for such startling bits of incomprehension as the
"lethal dose" of ionizing radiation for Escherichia coli being so
many roentgens, and a similar treatment for thermal disinfection
(though happily not for chemicals).  More pertinent for medical
students is some confusion in the treatment of Vi antigen, perhaps
because of the separation of typhoid and other Salmonellas in
distinct chapters.  At one point, Vi is heat stable, at another it
is heat labile in the presence of water, and the author's views on
its role in immunity are no less divided.
     To insist that "the efficacy of typhoid immunization is
undoubted" is to pass over one of the most vehement and engaging
of controversies currently raging among students of infectious
disease.
     A text of this scope, in a rapidly expanding field, is bound to
contain any number of such variances of interpretation.
Unfortunately, students in the medical schools are not always
encouraged to adopt a skeptical attitude towards their texts; perhaps
a few more obvious blemishes would be all to the good.  By and large,
the authors have done a serviceable job that warrants the confidence
already proven by the widespread adoption of the text.  They are
particularly to be commended for their adherence to the stated
emphasis of the interrelationships of microbes in their fundamental
structure, as well as their ecology, with other forms of life.

                                     J. Lederberg