Infectious Agents and Host Reactions

26 cm, 626 pages, illus., former owner's stamps on front endpaper. This book collects into one volume a great deal of information on the interrelationships of microorganisms and hosts that hitherto was scattered through the periodical literature. It is a curious book in some ways. One has the feeling that it was not so much edited, in the usual sense, as "put together." There is no apparent systematic approach to the subject, and it is not comprehensive. For example, in the section on infections by gram-negative pathogens there are chapters on Bordetella, Neisseria, cholera, Salmonella, Brucella, Treponema, and Mycoplasma. Why these particular organisms? I suspect that the topics were selected to fit the contributors rather than vice versa. Certainly, the list of contributors reads like a directory of the investigators who have done most over the past 20 or 30 years to develop our current concepts on the relations of host mechanisms to infectious processes.