Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

how he had slipped into a psychosis, failed to say anything about modern dynamic and analytic theories ofpsychosis. Kaplan, wisely, has quoted not only from books by people who have been psychotic but from some ofthe many magazine articles that have been written by the mentally disturbed . It is devoutly to be hoped that someday most ofus physicians will realize that ifwe are ever going to understand certain diseases, and especially the mental diseases, also epilepsy, alcoholism, drug addiction, homosexuality, and the impact on the mind ofa patient such as is produced by his heart disease, or tuberculosis, or blindness, or deafness, or a stroke, or any one ofmany crippling diseases, we must read the stories ofthe hundreds ofinvalids who have described their experiences, and usually have described them well. I admit that it is much more fun for a man to sit down at his desk and write a book telling how he imagines people came to be mentally upset and disturbed as they are; also, it is much more fun to imagine why an epileptic behaves as he sometimes does, or why an addict or an alcoholic, when gotten "offthe stuff" or "dried out" promptly goes back to his miserable life ofbondage and degradation—than to read a book like Kaplan's, giving a patient's explanation ofwhy he behaved as he did. We can only hope that someday every medical student who hopes to be an able physician will read and reread every book ofthis type that he can find. Then, perhaps when his professor tells him angrily that there is no such thing as an epileptic temperament, he will reread Margiad Evans' A Ray of Darkness, or he will reread Marc Slonim's The Three Loves oj Dostoevsky, and will see howwrong his professor was. Also, for the restofhis daysinmedicine hewill understand epileptics better and will have deep sympathy for them as they struggle with their often stormy emotions. Again, may I say that every physician who wants to be well informed and who wants to understand people who are mentally or nervously ill should read Kaplan's book. Walter C. Alvarez, M.D. yoo North Michigan Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60611 The Life and Times ofEmil H. Grubbe. By Paul C. Hodges, M.D. Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1964. Pp. 135. $3.95. In i960 Dr. Emil H. Grubbe died in Chicago, leaving a great name as a pioneer in the development of roentgenology. Dr. Grubbe was an eccentric. He was good newspapercopy ; once theeditorsrealizedthefacts ofhis eccentricity andhisurgeforpublicity, he was constantly sought after. He bequeathed the major portion ofhis estate to support the teaching and practice ofradiotherapy at the University ofChicago, but he stipulated that the university prepare and publish a biography ofhim. This is the biography, and Dr. Hodges has obviously written it con amore. The university made available to him all 417 of Dr. Grubbe's papers, records of interviews, tape recordings, and notes which were written ten to twenty years before his death, largely based on his memory and imagination . Dr. Hodges sees him as "a tough, shrewd, intelligent, relatively uneducated secondgeneration European, clawing his way up in the social and economic struggle that was being repeated thousands oftime all about him in the Chicago ofhis youth; asking and giving no quarter, dreaming great dreams, turning some of them into hard fact and in others substituting for frustration the illusion offact." Perhaps Dr. Grubbe was among the first to use X-ray. Heavy irradiation required numerous excisions and amputations later in his life. As he grew old, thefrequent retelling ofhis early experiences began to be elaborated, amplified, and subject to fantasy. Indeed, the story is told that he had worked with X-rays well in advance oftheir discovery by Roentgen; that he was the first to be injured by X-rays and the first to employ them therapeutically. Roentgen's discovery was made November 8, 1895. Chicago and New York papers carried the story inJanuary of 1896, after it first appeared in a Vienna paperJanuary 5, 1896. Probably from such newspaper stories Grubbe first learned about X-rays, but from that time on every report ofwhat happened must be viewed skeptically. He did...