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The Natural History of Infectious Disease

by SIR MACFARLANE BURNET, M.D., F.R.S., Director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Melbourne, Australia. 356 pp. with illustrations. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1953. Price $4.50

The book is a second edition of an earlier publication "Biological Aspects of Infectious Disease," with a new title and a sound account for all that has happened since 1940 toward an improved and practical approach to problems of acute infection. These things are many; astonishingly so, as developments are traced through antibiotics and chemotherapy to insectides and insect repellents; and not neglecting the growing appreciation of a social component in mass infection.

The admirable framework of the first edition has been maintained; it would be a pity had it been disturbed. The first two chapters deal with the ecologic point of view and with the evolution of ideas of infection and defense. A final chapter treats of new diseases and the outlook for the future. Of themselves these three chapters are enough to make any book worthwhile. In between is discussion of infectious agents and of defense mechanisms, then a consideration of mass disease of human populations where natural history guides interpretation of modes of spread, endemic and epidemic prevalence, and gives a basis for control measures.