Body Defenses, The Marvels and Mysteries of the Immune System

Peter Strathy is Vice-President Planning, Doctors’ Hospital, Toronto.

Body Defenses is the second resource book by the author of Understanding Cancer. Marilyn Dunlop, a medical writer for the Toronto Star for 15 years and a serious student of immunology, is well qualified to write this book.

While complex surgical procedures such as organ transplants and new drug discoveries tend to grab the headlines, the major breakthroughs in medical science have, for several decades, been in the field of immunology. The quest to “find a cure for cancer” as well as for various chronic debilitating diseases such as multiple sclerosis gave immunological research a strong impetus; the advent of AIDS, a disease which attacks the body’s immune system, provided a sharp focus in the public’s eye and an increased consciousness of the centrality of the immune system to life itself. Future decades should lead to a development of the capability to manipulate the immune system in order to cure and prevent many major diseases.

This book leads from a detailed description of the body’s basic immune system through chapters dealing with immune system deficiencies, auto-immune diseases, the impact of stress on immune system function, age and sex differences in immunity, cancer, organ transplants, and vaccines. A chapter on probable future discoveries and developments concludes the book.

Treatment is detailed and comprehensive, yet this complex and intricate subject, often highly technical, is outlined in a fashion fully understandable to the reader. The individual sections of the book, for example that on asthma, can stand by themselves, making the work useful as a reference tool. To this is added a directory of associations from which more information can be obtained.

This comprehensive work will be of great value in public library collections in the reference section. It will be of interest to lay students of medical science and to consumers desiring accurate up-to-date information on particular disease syndromes.