This unusual book presents twelve lively, literate and superbly written New Yorker stories of authentic medical detection. Among the twelve are "A Pig from Jersey" and "The Fog," which won the 1950 Lasker Foundation Award for medical reporting. Each story is, among other things, a tale of mystery and suspense. Each contains a detective, several victims, a more or less homicidal criminal, and events that actually occurred - most of them in the past ten years, in or near New York City. The participants, however, are not to be found in conventional studies of crime and detection. The detectives are not police officers: they are doctors - medical inspectors, epidemiologists or research scientists. The criminals are not men and women, but, for the most part, microbes. And the victims fall prey not only to the murderous assaults of such criminals, but to their own ignorance as well. For the pistol blasts and dagger thrusts in these riddles are diseases that can be easily avoided....