This text on general medicine was written for "students and doctors (apart from subspecialists) [who] are not usually confronted by patients complaining that they have a specific disease, but rather by people with a problem." Toward this end the authors have divided the book into 11 chapters, each covering a conventional subspecialty of internal medicine, except for psychiatry, neurology, and dermatology. These chapters are then subdivided according to symptoms (eg, breathlessness under "Problems in Respiratory Disease"), signs (eg, cyanosis under both "Cardiovascular Problems" and "Problems in Respiratory Disease") and syndromes (eg, syndrome of acute glomerulonephritis in "Problems in Renal Medicine" and even an oddity called "funny turns" in the section on "Problems in Neurology"). Presumably, if you are a medical student or a generalist and your patient is initially seen with a fever, for example, you look for causes of fever by turning to page 22 (under "Cardiovascular Problems"), or