Recent Book: Poisons
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X5903200415 |
| Published date | 01 October 1959 |
| Date | 01 October 1959 |
| Subject Matter | Recent Book |
THE
LATE
C. C. H.
MORIARTY
and
W. J.
WILLIAMS:
Police Law.
An
Arrangement of Law and Regulations
for
the Use of Police Officers.
Butterworth. ISs. 6d.
IT
WOULD
be to
damn
this excellent little
handbook
with
unduly
faint praise
to apply to this, the fifteenth edition of it,
'he
spirit of the possibly
apocryphal
Poet
Laureate's
lines on his dying Monarch,
and
say:
"Along
the wire the electric message
came-
He is not
better-he
is still the
same."
This edition is, it is true, very much the same as previous ones, allowing
for the new material
that
has been included. But then it is difficult to see
that
there is
any
room
for actual improvement, once one has acknowledged
the limitations in scope laid down by its first
author,
the
late
Mr. Moriarty,
whose death earlier this
year
brought
notable
tributes to his capacity
and
leadership as
Chief
Constable of Birmingham. But his pupils occupy a
far
wider territory
than
the city limits,
and
few police officers serving today do
not
look
upon
his Police Law with affection
and
gratitude.
The
arrangement
of the
book
under
subject headings is, of course,
familiar to most officers, since it is the
standard
book in use at the District
Training
Centres.
It
is
quite
the clearest way
of
setting
out
the subject
matter,
and
the accurate
and
comprehensive index makes using
the
book
extremely easy for those who, in the words of the Preface to the
First
Edition, wish to
attain
aworking knowledge of
the
law they have to
enforce, or are desirous of refreshing their knowledge of
that
law.
Times have changed, of course, in the thirty years since the
First
Edition
appeared.
What
with the high
standard
of technical training now main-
tained at the Training Centres,
and
the new centralised
promotion
examina-
tions, it is perhaps
doubtful
if Police
Law
truly fulfils the
further
aims
originally expressed by its
author,
of serving as an aid to sitting examina-
tions, or of increasing professional knowledge. But it is quite certain
that
any young officer with his eyes on higher things would be foolish to
abandon
Moriarty on ending his
probation,
or to fail to secure his own
copy of each new edition as it appears.
And
if in time he comes to regard
it merely as a useful index to an increasingly complex subject, he can be
sure
that
his new confidence owes much to Moriarty's Police Law.
T.C.w.
V. J.
BROOKES
and
M. B.
JACOBS:
Poisons. Second Edition. D.
van
Nostrand
Co. Inc., New Jersey. $6.50.
THE
AVOWED
PURPOSE
of the first edition (1945) of this
book
was to describe
the properties and chemical identification of poisons
and
the symptoms
and
emergency treatment
of
poisoning.
The
fact
that
the methods of handling poison cases in the United States,
according to this book, differ very materially
from
the
procedure
adopted
in this country detracts
from
the value of the
book
to British readers.
In the new edition an
attempt
has been
made
to extend the treatment to
the
numerous
new substances, many poisonous in nature,
that
have come
since the first edition
into
use in industry, medicine
and
the home. Sections
on radiation hazards, on chemical
warfare
agents
and
on artificial respira-
tion
have been included.
Initial chapters,
after
some general suggestions to
the
investigator faced
with a case of poisoning,
attempt
to outline in a few pages the
fundamentals
of chemistry
and
the identification
of
poisons before dealing at length with
the symptoms caused by
common
poisons
and
the emergency treatments to
be applied.
Longer
chapters detail the occurrence, use, and identification by specific
tests of
numerous
poisons, in alphabetical order, of a general or industrial
character
and
repeat
the symptoms and emergency
treatment
that
follow
their application or ingestion.
Much of the
information
in these chapters is repeated in a summarised
or
tabulated
form in
other
parts of the book. This fills much space but
perhaps
is helpful in permitting cross-references between aparticular
poisonous substance and the type of
product
in which it may occur.
Ashort
chapter
on industrial hazards outlines the factors
that
influence
chemical risks in industry and summarises the preventive methods to be
October-December, 1959 283
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