Charles F. Wooley. 321 pages. Mount Kisco, New York: Futura Publishing Company; 1992. $50.00.

Dr. Charles Wooley, who has spent nearly his entire professional career in the Division of Cardiology at The Ohio State University, has written a useful overview of the history of cardiology at his institution. This book emphasizes the critical importance of mentor-mentee relationships. Dr. Wooley shows that these relationships inculcate a series of professional values and attitudes that, as students grow into professors, division chiefs, and departmental chairs, reverberate beyond the confines of a single relationship.

The heart of this book is transcribed interviews obtained from important Ohio State cardiologists. Duke University's Eugene Stead is the only interviewee whose career was not centered at Ohio State. Through his student James Warren, longtime chair of Medicine at Ohio State, Stead provides a link between his pre-World War II teachers at Harvard to the cardiologists trained under Warren. Stead's interview highlights Wooley's emphasis on passing on an academic heritage.

The interviews are simultaneously the strength and weakness of the book. The interviewees are remarkably candid. The interviews are especially useful because they focus on a cardiology division whose strength was teaching and patient care. They provide insight into the struggle to balance conflicts among teaching, service, and research within academic medicine at an institution more typical of American medical centers than the more storied research centers.

Unfortunately, the interviews fail to come together as a cohesive book. A reader unfamiliar with Ohio State is given only sketchy details about events at the medical school and university. This underscores the absence of a wider perspective that would further our appreciation of the intersection between academic life and broader social changes. Although such issues inevitably appear in the lives of individual interviewees, they remain in the background.

The absence of extended analysis means this work is best considered as a primary, rather than secondary, source in the history of medicine. It is more memoir than history. Although those familiar with Ohio State or the history of cardiology will enjoy this work, it is difficult to imagine a wide audience for it.