A MAN NAMED HOFFMAN

Further in this continuity (Eleven Blue Men; The Incurable Wound;) in which Mr. Roueche, the New Yorker's impeccable investigator, is again on the piste of baffling to noxious medical phenomena, usually little known and fortunately less frequent Whether it's the ""leaves of three/ quickly flee"" of poison ivy, or the Dutch elm disease, the placebo with its palliative effects on many kinds of illnesses and its beneficial usefulness to research, or the experiences recorded and theories advanced on deja vu, all have more than occasional points of interest. Then there's Rosemary Morton, whose episodes of gravitational anarchy (sinking floors and tilting rooms) were finally diagnosed as ""labyrinthitis""; the seldom threat of anthrax fulfilled when a man died through contact with goat hair felt; the endoparasitic worm which a young man picked up in the East and retained through months of debilitating and frightening manifestations; the epidemic outbreaks in an Arkansas town (a sick bird) and one in Massachusetts (contaminated melons); etc., etc.... Mr. Roueche, as has been well established, records these tracers assiduously, authoritatively and effortlessly.