Brain, Vol. 125, No. 12, 2783-2784,
December 2002
© 2002 Oxford University Press
Book Review |
MOSBY’S COLOR ATLAS AND TEXT OF NEUROLOGY, 2ND EDITION
Walton Centre for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Liverpool, UK
MOSBY’S COLOR ATLAS AND TEXT OF NEUROLOGY, 2ND EDITION
By G. David Perkin
2002. London: Elsevier Science
Price £28.95. pp. 352. ISBN 0723432082.
This is an excellent little book, covering all common, and a lot of uncommon, neurology in its 352 A3-sized pages. Its author writes concisely and clearly, in a way I can only admire. The presentation is further enhanced by liberal use of bullet points and colour-coded boxes, which list key points, a list of symptoms and definitions, etc. Clinical photographs, radiological plates and line drawings supplement all this to produce a book that is as easy to read and absorb as any I can remember.
The chapters are grouped in conventional fashion for general neurology books. The first chapters deal with the symptoms and signs of neurological disease. Later chapters go into specific neurological disorders. Here, Dr Perkin gets the balance about right between the common and the rare. In this second edition, considerable updates have been made to those sections covering the genetic ataxias and the channelopathies but at no stage does the book get bogged down in too much detail. The whole breadth of neurology has been covered and an 18-page index helps you find your way around. My only criticism would be that, considering the frequency of psychiatric disorders in neurology and non-organic ‘neurological’ symptoms, this three-page section could usefully have been expanded.
This is indeed an excellent book, but who will read it? The target audience is stated to be medical students and graduates studying for high qualifications, such as MRCP. I think that most of us would be delighted if even half of this knowledge was taken onboard and used by such doctors, which is perhaps a reflection of the small amount of neurological instruction most students and juniors have in the UK. I would have thought that this book stands as good a chance as any of getting across to these groups, if they choose to tackle the subject (one sometimes detects a degree of self-fulfilling defeatism about learning neurology). They have no excuse now. The author obviously appreciates the clinically important and relevant, and describes it lucidly and succinctly in a beautifully presented book. Certainly my copy will find its way to our next newly appointed neurology specialist registrar; if he or she can absorb and use the knowledge in this book, then more advanced training can then begin ...
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