The Court of Appeals of Minnesota, in State v. Saunders ), held that the statutory offense of practicing medicine without a license was not unconstitutionally vague as applied to a claim involving a farmer who offered a home remedy to cure cancer. The court held that, although Minnesota Statute § 147.081 subd. 3 contains general language and undefined terms, the statute contains sufficient particularity to show ordinary persons what conduct is prohibited, and thereby passes the void-for-vagueness test. The court stated (...) that, according to the statute, while a person holding a license to practice medicine is permitted to engage in a broad range of conduct, those without that license are proscribed from engaging in that same range of conduct.The defendant, Mr. Saunders, a dairy farmer, claimed that he could cure ill people by injecting an ill person's blood into a cow and then feeding that person the cow's colostrum. (shrink)

"Of the making of many books there is no end" seems reasonable enough when the subject is infinity but after reading this well-organized study one is not so sure; a figure suggested by Zeno speaks of "a fog [which] the incessant labours of modern scholars often cause." Sweeney’s methodology is to use the ever-increasing body of modern critical discussions as a help in interpreting and assessing the presocratic fragments and their ancient commentators. For Anaximander a particularly detailed and nuanced coverage (...) of the literature between 1947 and 1970 is presented-over twenty major interpretations, with supplementary articles treated in an Appendix. Subsequent chapters treat in less detail the positions on infinity of the other Ionians, Pythagoras, the Eleatics, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Atomists. Here the author relies heavily on existing surveys like those of Kirk and Raven and Guthrie. This raises a question about the kind of audience envisaged. To a sentence like "Let us now trace as simply and yet accurately as possible Raven’s views", Raven could be pardoned for reacting with the impression that he had already done just that himself. Much of the book is a perhaps over-leisurely doxography of work written in uncomplicated English, albeit in widely scattered journals; nonetheless Sweeney’s imposing, almost intimidating, coverage of bibliography will save even seasoned ancient philosophers many hours of L'année philologique-hunting and makes his work an important and eminently worthwhile contribution. Apart from some relatively minor misprints there is a serious confusion of Alcmaeon with the poet Alcman. Alcman deserves better treatment in the exegesis of Anaximander’s "rather poetical terms."—T. H. (shrink)

In a highly conscious break with what is termed "orthodox Darwinism," i.e., evolution by natural selection of individual adaptive character, the author presents his forceful and suggestive attempt to recast evolutionary theory by taking Darwin's later concept of the reproductive mode of genetic groups as fundamental. The goal of this reorientation is a "descriptive behavioral science" of evolution from the most primitive clusters of inorganic matter to human societies. The book is "Blakean" in its scope and tone of vision, but (...) suffers from heaviness of style and its misplaced messianic pretensions and prophetic wrath. However, in arguing for a continuity of cosmological, natural and human evolution, and in suggesting a synthesis of the insights of Darwin and Freud, the book is powerful and convincing.—T. R. H. (shrink)