Notes

The AMERICAN-SOVIET MEDICAL SOCIETY has been founded to meet an increasing demand for information about the results and achievements of Soviet medicine. Reports

have reached this country of spectacular feats of surgery wrought by the Soviet medical corps all along the far-flung battle line, from Leningrad to the Caucasus. These contributions to medicine are the result of twenty-five years of untiring effort, during which the Soviet Union has built up an impressive system of public health and medicine. In hundreds of scientific research institutions behind the battle line, thousands of physicians and scientists are engaged in investigations. Yet the results are little known in this country, primarily because until now there has been no organization prepared to exchange medical information although the language in many cases has proved an almost insurmountable barrier. The American-Soviet Medical Society will fill this gap. Through meetings, the publication of a journal, and the establishment of a library of information, the Society will tell physicians of America and members of the allied professions on what problems their Soviet colleagues are working and what steps they are taking to solve them. On the other hand, the Society will send American medical books and periodicals to the Soviet Union in order to keep the Russians informed of scientific developments in this country and to stimulate closer cooperation between the medical corps of the two countries. After the war, as soon as conditions permit, the Society hopes to promote the exchange of students and scientists and to sponsor study tours in the two countries. The president of the Society is Dr. Walter B. Cannon, professor emeritus of physiology at Harvard University, member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. Dr. Henry E. Sigerist, director of the Institute of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, is the editor of th