Abstract
This is a good book. This is a bad book. And the good and bad aspects interact in a perplexing way. Birch and Tolmie set out to write for medical students a brief and readable introduction to anesthesia. They cover such mundane areas as how to start an IV, how to monitor vital signs, how to adjust an operating room table, and how to protect a patient on the table against nerve palsies. They even mention practice arrangements and malpractice problems. They also provide brief and sometimes breezy accounts of acidbase balance and ventilators, in addition to the obvious subjects for a primer in anesthesia. All that is good. There is no book that does not contain some errors, nor is there a reviewer who could not find an example of misplaced emphasis. I won't mention these because the biggest questions the book raises lie elsewhere. In their attempt to
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