The Excerpta Medica Foundation, based in the Netherlands, admirably continues to disseminate medical information on an international scale through its abstract services, sponsorship of symposia, preparation of films, and publication of conference proceedings. The volume under purview is No. 292 in the international series, a report of a World Congress of Anaesthesiologists held in Kyoto, Japan, in September 1972. Immediaately one ponders on the educational value of this editorial endeavor. While a conference on a finite subject such as endocrinology is more or less bound to be productive, mainly in the scientific sense, another kind, directed, as here, to a specialty of medicine, offers a higher reward: a view of the spectrum of practice in various countries. The result is a better understanding on the international level of all manner of issues, not those of medicine alone.
This is a handsomely done volume, the page print pleasing to the eye