Dominic Haigh, University of Birmingham

This new edition loses two main things. The title Wheater's Basic Histopathology has been trimmed down to Wheater's Basic Pathology to remove the ambiguity whereby people confused the book with the similarly-titled Wheater's Functional Histology. The second thing which has been lost is the co-authorship of rock stars of histology Nottingham's Stevens and Lowe, who are replaced with Drs Stewart and O'Dowd from Glasgow. Neither of these changes signal any major change in direction for the series, and these losses are more than compensated for in gains in content. Some chapters have been completely rewritten, others have been updated, but the consistently high standard of previous editions has been maintained. Clinical descriptions of the features of disease are accompanied by slides of tissue predominantly stained with H&E and diagrams, boxes and tables where appropriate. Slides are frequently laid out side by side in order to compare the appearance of healthy tissue with pathological tissue, or to compare the appearance of one condition with that of another. This is particularly important in situations where clinical entities which can present with near-identical signs and symptoms have very different aetiologies and treatments. Different stages of the same disease, such as well-differentiated and poorly-differentiated colonic adenocarcinomas are annotated and explained. It is rare in the book to find a long stretch of unbroken text. There is at least one micrograph on each double-page spread, befitting for a book dedicated to tying together histopathological findings with clinical descriptions. Student Consult online content includes images available for personal, non-commercial use.

Posted 26th Jan 2010