Friends of Dr. Talbot have long known that he was writing a book on endocrinology and have waited impatiently for its publication. Its appearance this year, with his associates at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Sobel, Dr. McArthur, and Dr. Crawford as co-authors, is an event well worth the waiting. Condensed into the 638 pages of this volume is an encyclopedic amount of information concerning the role of the endocrine glands in health and disease.
The approach is refreshingly different from that of the older textbooks on this subject, most of which have followed a stereotyped pattern which carries the reader on a tour of Barnum and Bailey's freak show. In this volume, while all the gross disorders due to glandular dysfunction are adequately described, the emphasis throughout is on the functioning of endocrine-controlled systems which maintain homeostasis during the course of almost every disease the clinician is called upon