A medium touch

50 limit was blamed on slightly out-of-specification tyre pressures and head race torques, with a slight suspicion of the "Commissioner's dog" having been about the place. No policeman can ever suffer brain fade, it would seem! Shilton relates the tale of how a long-time Triumph dealer in New Zealand came regularly to visit the factory each year. His first visit, after the appointment of a new managing director, saw him grudgingly offered five minutes with the big man. H e went home to talk to the Japanese and, on his first visit to the Yamaha factory was greeted with "Yamaha welcomes our friends from New Zealand" in large neon across the front of the factory. This Triumph MD was the brains behind a project to produce the "Vehicle for the masses", a hideous threewheeler moped with a hinge in the middle called the Ariel 3. Needless to say it was a total, hugely expensive failure that pushed BSAITriumph a lot further down the hill. Honda have just introduced a similar device (I refuse to call it a motorcycle) and are meeting a similar response. The British road bike industry is now down to the one bike a week, £6000, Hesketh. Read this book and you will understand why. ADK

A MEDIUM TOUCH

Friction Ridge Skin James F Cowger (Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1983, 210pp., index, ISBN 0 444 00770 9 $39.50) This book is like the curate's egg: good in parts. It is clearly printed and the points made are well illustrated. However, like so many books which attempt to address both the uninitiated and the cognoscenti-as the author claims in his preface-Mr. Cowger's book will have shortcomings for both groups. It is probably set at too high a level of detail for those reading purely for an appreciation of the subject. For new entrants to fingerprint work it could serve as a useful 'primer'. For more advanced fingerprint workers and experienced specialists it suffers from sins of omission. Can one really write a serious book on fingerprint science-mark development, classification and identification-and make no reference to the part that computer systems are now playing and their great potential for the future? Can one dismiss in a couple of lines highly important processes like vacuum metal deposition and cadaver digit casting? Can one put forward PDMAC with all its drawbacks as a serious method of mark development? Can one omit amido black when mentioning blood marks? The reference bibliography is short. This is perhaps a clue to the reason for these and other omissions. 235

The tables on pattern incidence in Chapter 6 are interesting but simplistic. They could be significantly displaced according to the ethnic origin of the population surveyed, a fact which the author briefly mentions (page 132). This book is certainly one which should have a place in any forensic fingerprint classroom or library but can in no way be regarded as a definitive work on fingerprints.

COME BACK ARISTOTLE

Law and Medical Ethics JK Mason and RA McCall Smith (Butterworths, London, 1983, 275 pp., index, ISBN 0 406 40016 4, £8.95) The professional life has become a hazardous one. The lawyer, the forensic scientist, but most of all the doctor, are at constant risk of having decisions questioned, challenged and disapproved. None of us should expect to be free wholly of such attacks, for despite the personal financial advantages, the essential criterion of the professional is that he works also in the public interest, being bound by an ethical code. A solicitor is an officer of the court, whosoever be his client; the forensic scientist's duty is to elucidate, to expound and not to equivocate; the doctor's view must extend beyond the mere national, directing his bemused brain by the Declarations of Geneva (as amended at Sydney, 1968), Tokyo (1975), of Oslo (1970), of Helsinki (revised 1975). These represent the distilled deliberations of worthy bodies and are set out as appendices by Professor Mason (currently President of the British Association in Forensic Medicine) and Dr McCall Smith (Lecturer in Civil Law) to their brisk guided tour of the arcane moral issues only dimly perceived as besetting doctors in their everyday lives. Some of it is surprisingly practical, down to earth stuff. In the section devoted to medical practice the few pages devoted to that new doctors' dilemma-infinite aspirations, finite resources-are particularly apposite to the crises of conscience that the promotion of private medicine for profit on the American model has provoked. In relation to the National Health Service it is so difficult to get beyond the simple yet unhelpful arguments that increased spending will always mean better provision or changing the organisation will improve its effectiveness or privatisation equals victimisation. In this very context Professor Hampton from Nottingham makes a trenchant comment under the heading "The end of clinical freedom" in the British Medical Journal of 29 October 1983: "Clinical freedom died accidentally, crushed between the rising cost of new forms of investigation and treatment and the financial limits inevitable in an economy that cannot expand indefinitely. Clinical freedom should, however, have been strangled 236