Medical Aspects of Mental Retardation.

Abstract

The text is divided into 32 chapters dealing with multiple aspects of mental retardation and neurological disease. The preface of this book is neither erudite nor accurate and is no encouragement to read further. The editor says, At 22 weeks the brain is a homogenous, undifferentiated structure; he also talks about distorted genes. Neither of these statements encourage confidence in the editorial staff. There are a number of chapters that are worth reading and have either valuable and well-organized information or an excellent bibliography. These chapters are 1-3,6,8,12,13,17-22,24, and 26-28. There was obviously a great deal of time spent in their preparation. As a result, the text and bibliography serve as a review of the literature. On the other hand, many of the other chapters are poorly organized and show no evidence of editorial supervision. Some of the material is repeated in several chapters, even in those chapters which were