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By Jutta Schickore
317 pp, $40.25
Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-2267-3784-5

JAMA. 2008;299(16):1962-1963.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

"Objects in mirror are closer than they appear." This message on the passenger-door mirror reminds drivers that what they see is not necessarily what they get. This convex mirror offers a greater field of vision than the flat driver’s-door mirror but at the cost of compressing the view, thus making objects appear to be smaller and hence further away from the viewer than they actually are. Competent drivers learn to adjust to this helpful distortion and compensate accordingly. Similar problems of understanding what was seen and why it might appear as it did faced those who used convex lenses to increase the size of objects under the microscope.

The history of microscopy was once told as a march of technical progress which, with a few noteworthy exceptions (the Netherlander Antoni van Leeuwenhoek [1632-1723] or England's Robert Hooke [1635-1703]), only really began with the compound microscopes in the 1830s. These instruments . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Helen Bynum, PhD, Reviewer
Shadingfield, Suffolk, United Kingdom
helen1bynum@fsmail.net