Current Diagnosis and Treatment

Ed Roy Pounder, Mark Hamilton Churchill Livingstone, pounds sterling40, pp 600 ISBN 0 443 05599 8

Is it a textbook? Is it a colour atlas? Is it “Lecture Notes in…”? No, it's a bit of all of these, but not quite any of them. Here is something fresh and new, with no parents, though a few great uncles with a faint family likeness. Its front cover delivers its mission statement: “A QUICK Reference for the Clinician”—and that is precisely what it is.

The editors have provided a challenging brief for the 200 or more individual contributors: to encapsulate on two facing pages a great deal of punchy detail about a particular disease, syndrome, symptom (for …