摘要：Twenty-one authors from varied fields have made contributions to this rather diverse collection of articles and essays. Regional "medicometrics" is defined by Bailly in a brief introduction as a wide-open discipline ("discipline ouverte"), which studies medical functions ("fonctionnement médical") through the confronting of diverse viewpoints emanating from econometricians, economists, geographers, hospital administrators, private and hospital physicians, and "users", and which emphasises the regional side of medical practice together with the resulting cost-benefits that are associated with such practice (p. 7). The book is divided into three sections (after brief surveys of regional medicometrics and of the history of medical geography): 1) analysis of medical behaviour; 2) the management and planning of hospital locations; and 3) medical education and regional ambulatory health care. It would seem that regional medicometrics as a field so-defined should cover more themes than these three. For example, it might be logically concluded that the spatial analysis of user locations in relation to hospital and clinic networks would fit weil into this same interdisciplinary field. As it is, in this book the supply side is emphasized; even in the brief chapter by Gilliand ("Swiss medical demography", p. 59), the au thor zeros in on the supply of doctors, even though the title of his paper might have lent itself to some treatment of the demand side of medical services and health care in general.
