Abstract
THE author of this work states in his preface that he hopes it will meet its aim of covering all the necessary ground for the student preparing for the diploma of public health, and that he has endeavoured to make it as useful in the laboratory as in the study; furthermore, he hopes it may also be useful to sanitary officers and medical officers of the public services. A glance suffices to make it plain that he has not achieved his aim. He has failed because he attempted the impossible when he set himself the task of covering the whole range of the science and practice of hygiene and public health within the narrow compass of a small, handy volume. The work is, in fact, little more than a digest or summary, which is not suited to the student's needs, and the lack of detail is also an essential respect in which it will fail to meet the needs of the public-health official. It is not sufficient, for instance, to tell the student for the diploma of public health that in reference to the working of a barometer, corrections have to be made for capillarity, temperature, and altitude (p. 29), when his examiners expect him to know how these corrections are made; nor is it sufficient to offer a sanitary official, presumably for reference purposes, a digest of sanitary law in which the whole of the important and complicated subject of legislation dealing with the food supply is dismissed in a page and a half of printed matter.
The Essentials of Sanitary Science.
By Gilbert E. Brooke. Pp. xii+413. (London: Henry Kimpton, 1909.) Price 6s. net.
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The Essentials of Sanitary Science . Nature 80, 183 (1909). https://doi.org/10.1038/080183a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/080183a0