DOES THE WORLD NEED A NEW TEXTBOOK OF PEDIATRICS?

Abstract

A major new text on pediatrics, the first in more than a decade, justifies breaking our recent decision to discontinue book reviews in Pediatrics, for many of our readers will want to know about the new text. There is much that is different in this text including: the opening chapter on ecology of patient care; obtaining the data base (a good description of history taking and physical examination that is generally missing from standard texts, and also covers computers in medicine and record systems); an elegant, competent and practical chapter on nutrition; perinatal care (including much more on intrauterine and birth processes, human sexuality, contraception, and abortion than is usual in pediatric texts); social pediatrics (family change, day care, divorce, foster care, rights of children); organization of health services for children; adolescent pregnancies, rape, runaway children, substance abuse; sleep disorders; inherited disease (well-done, with branching logic trees for assisting in diagnosis); common orthopedia problems; and tests for infectious diseases. These chapters are among those that I found most useful. But there are also good chapters on disorders of each organ-system, covering diseases seen in the office or the hospital. Indeed, very little is missing from this book. It deals with traditional pediatric problems as well as new ones. A reviewer presumably looks for faults. I found several. The major ones are redundancy and difficulty in looking up topics. Because the book is organized under several different subjects, the same topics are often dealt with under sections on diagnosis, organ-system disorders, and causes of disease.