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Introduction to the history of plant pathology

G. C. AINSWORTH, Introduction to the history ofplant pathology, Cambridge University Press, 1981, 8vo, pp. xii, 315, illus., £27.50. This well-produced and -illustrated book is, of course, primarily intended for those dealing specifically with botany or agriculture. Yet much of it will be of interest to doctors and medical historians, and the author himself notes the importance of interdisciplinary studies to all professions. Plants, like man and other animals, suffer predominantly from diseases caused by fungi, bacteria, and viruses. Dr. Ainsworth shows that the plant pathologist is in fact a plant doctor or, rather, an epidemiologist whose task it is to diagnose, treat, and prevent diseases of plant populations, and he has organized his book on this basis. The medical historian is reminded that some of the fundamental discoveries concerning human medicine have been the outcome of research into plant diseases. The first experimental evidence of the pathogenicity of any micro-organism was provided, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by the demonstration that bunt of wheat is caused by a fungus; while the existence of viruses was revealed, at the very end of the century, by experiments on tobacco mosaic disease. For the plant world, however, the fungi are by far the most important pathogenic agents, whereas in human and animal pathology the bacteria and viruses predominate. Since the fungi rarely proliferate within the human or animal body, their possible pathogenicity to man and animals has, until very recently, been largely ignored outside Russia and Eastern Europe. Yet, it has long been known that a toxic fungus was responsible for the outbreaks of ergotism which ravaged Europe from the Middle Ages up to the nineteenth century. Since the second World War, if not earlier, the Russians have incriminated exo-toxins of various fungi as the cause of other serious epidemic conditions in man and animals. More recently, it has been shown that some of these toxins may be carcinogenic in animals, and that such aflatoxins are widely present in groundnuts, wheat, and other crops used for human and animal food, and can even enter the milk of cattle. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the Russians have now been accused of initiating mycological warfare, with a "yellow rain" containing fungal exo-toxins. It is, therefore, somewhat disappointing that Dr. Ainsworth, one of the world's foremost mycologists, should confine this book almost entirely to the quantitative effects of plant diseases. Their qualitative aspects must surely be of interest to us all, and not least to plant pathologists and medical historians. Elinor Lieber Green College, Oxford