The image of obstetrics as a largely manipulative art has changed radically in recent years. The risk to a healthy mother of pregnancy and labour has been markedly reduced and morbidity not mortality is the yardstick by which the quality of maternal care is judged. We are now able to devote far more attention to the fetus whose growth patterns and behaviour in utero can be studied in detail by modern and sophisticated technical aids with a resultant improvement in perinatal mortality. A patient with a pre-existing general disease, however, still presents a problem which is best managed by close co-operation between obstetrician and physician. Essential hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, thyroid disease and epilepsy are examples of disorders which require great care throughout pregnancy and during labour if good maternal and fetal results are to be obtained. There are many questions still to be answered. What is the place of hypotensive therapy in essential hypertension complicating pregnancy? When should delivery take place in the pregnant diabetic? How should the patient be delivered? What should be her management during labour? What is the risk of fetal abnormality in the epileptic patient who becomes pregnant whilst on anti-epileptic drugs? These questions and others have been the subject of a recent symposium in the Institute of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

This book is about drugs and how they are used in the treat ment of disease. The development of effective drugs is one of the wonders of our century. It is difficult to believe that so few of the medicines we now use routinely were available when our grandparents were children. The last 50 years has seen an astonishing burst of dis coveries - antibiotics, antihypertensives, antiarrhythmics, psycho tropics, anticonvulsants, steroids and many others. Of course this pace of advance has brought problems. Modern drugs are more powerful than the remedies they replaced, so it takes more skill and knowledge to use them correctly. Therapeutics has had to become more disciplined and now relies heavily on clinical pharma cology, which is the science of drugs in man. The tradition of this series of books has been to answer the questions an intelligent person would ask about a particular subject. Conventional texts on pharmacology can seem rather dull catalogues of drugs. Of course it is important to identify a drug, but it seems of greater importance to know how drugs work, how they are chosen for particular patients, what problems they produce and why. In this book the Socratic question and answer format has been deliberately chosen to bring out this sort of information."