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The foreword of a book can be a revealing thing. Here the author holds out his offering and like the prologue to a play, with hope and some apology, asks you to like this part of him. Whether Carl Binger's opening comparison of his thoughts to impaled winged insects has deep and perhaps subtle implications about himself we can only surmise. He has, regardless of this possibility, proved a highly successful entomologist with his own brain children.
Had he written and offered only the chapters which emphasize the great importance of the medical history, the publication of this book would have been justified. 'Why the Professor Fell Out of Bed's is handled like a detective story and is just as gripping and more instructive. When added to this are some well-phrased comments on psychosomatic medicine and the wider applications of psychoanalytic theory to social behavior, this small volume becomes worth while indeed.
The tradition of good writing—a clear and sensitive style with richness of metaphor—is a long one in the medical profession. Increasingly, as the need for honesty in the expression of feeling grows, physicians, from their wide background of human experience and the relation of science to it, move toward simpler and more direct statements of their thinking. As Hemingway says, 'There are older and better words (than the ten-dollar variety) which if