We have traveled a long road since Victor Lindlahr, the late popular nutritionist grandiloquently proclaimed, "You are what you eat!" An essential part of our becoming what we eat is the absorption of nutriment by the intestine. How long and tedious has been our road of learning, even of this limited aspect of assimilation, is attested by Dr. Gerald Wiseman's compendium of 564 pages.
This is, in fact, a compendium and not a textbook. Certainly it is not a vade mecum. The author does not state his intent in his preface; but if his intent was to abstract most of the significant reports pertaining to the phenomena of intestinal absorption which have appeared in English and to assemble these one- or two- sentence abstracts in a reasonably orderly form, then he has succeeded.
The pity is that he has done just this and nothing more. For few of the topics