Hitchin Hospital

The following books are reviewed. The Mothers Legacy to her Vnborn Childe, by Elizabeth Joscelin Jean Ledrew Metcalfe (Ed.), 2000 Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 135 pp., ISBN 0 8020 4694 0, £28.00 Life into Story: the courtship of Elizabeth Wiseman MARY CHAN, 1998 Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. xlvii + 113 pp., ISBN 1 8401 4212 X, £37.50 Lanyer: a Renaissance woman poet SUZANNE WOODS, 1999 Oxford: Oxford University Press. xiv + 198 pp., 0 19512 484 7, £30.00 Kateryn Parr: the making of a queen SUSAN E. JAMES, 1999 Aldershot: Ashgate. 480 pp., ISBN 1 84014 633 4, £47.50 Women's Gothic: from Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley E.J. CLERY, 2000 Tavistock: Northcote House in association with the British Council. 168 pp., ISBN 0 7463 0872 8, £9.99 Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in context MARLENE TROMP, PAMELA K. GILBERT & AERON HAYNIE (Eds), 1999 Albany: State University of New York Press. 302 pp., paperback, US$19.95 Small Change: women, learning, patriotism, 1750-1810 HARRIET GUEST, 2000 Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 350pp., ISBN 0 226 31052 3, £11.50 Mary Wollstonecraft: a revolutionary life JANET TODD, 2000 London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. xxii + 516 pp., ISBN 0 297 84299 4, £20 Faithful Handmaid: Fanny Burney at the court of King George III HESTER DAVENPORT Gloucester: Sutton Publishing. 240 pp., ISBN 0 7509 1881 0, £25.00 Fanny Burney: a biography CLAIRE HARMAN London: HarperCollins. 430 pp., ISBN 0 0025 5690 1, £19.99 Frances Burney: a literary life JANICE FARRAR THADDEUS Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. 263 pp., ISBN 0 3336 0764 3, £11.99 Their Fair Share: women, power and criticism in the Athenaeum, from Millicent Garrett Fawcett to Katherine Mansfield, 1870-1920 MARYSA DEMOOR, 2000 London: Ashgate. 176 pp., ISBN 0 7546 0118 8, £42.50

Nocturnal supplementary nasogastric feeding in a domiciliary setting coupled with dietary counselling in 4 patients with a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa is detailed. The four patients were given nocturnal supplementary nasogastric feeds, for periods of 16 days to 12 weeks. In three of the four patients substantial weight gains of 4.3 to 11.5 kg were achieved and all four patients reported substantial increases in daily voluntary oral food intake.We conclude that this approach may enable the patient to be managed at home and provides a basis for further psychotherapy treatment.

Mention in Godfrey Stafford's Presidential address (Physics Bulletin September 1987 p343) of the comment 'that most children born to Cambridge physicists were girls ... ' reminds me of my years at CERL, Leatherhead, where a colleague had a standing bet with any expectant father that the child would be a girl. He rarely lost.

In normal dogs, bolus administration of a very high dose of mannitol (2 gm/kg) resulted in a small, transient increase in cerebral blood flow (CBF) of approximately 8 percent lasting less than 10 minutes followed by a significant reduction in CBF of approximately 20 percent lasting at least three hours. The increase in CBF may in part be related to changes in cardiovascular and hematological parameters. No explanation is available for the reduction below control values but, since urine losses were not replace in these animals, changes in the state of hydration may have been responsible. It appears that the increase in CBF resulting from mannitol administered by bolus infusion are of neither sufficient magnitude nor duration to explain the protective effect observed in other studies where cerebral blood flow was reduced below ischemic levels. This suggests then, that either the effect of mannitol on CBF is quantitatively different when flow is reduced to critical levels or that the protective effect observed when the cerebral circulation is compromised is based upon a different mechanism than augmentation of flow. Further studies on the effect of mannitol on CBF in ischemic situations, where the cerebral circulation is compromised, are required.