Book Review

The Interface of Neurology and Internal Medicine

N Engl J Med 2008; 358:1527April 3, 2008

Article

The Interface of Neurology and Internal Medicine
Edited by José Biller. 1021 pp., illustrated. Philadelphia, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2008. $185. ISBN: 978-0-7817-7906-7

This book has many positive attributes, starting with the quality of the editing. The editor, José Biller, heads the neurology department at Loyola University in Chicago and is a prolific investigator of stroke. He also has a national reputation as a star of the “NeuroBowl,” a diagnostic contest at the largest annual meeting of neurologists. In this contest, a clinical vignette is presented, and the competitors must respond within seconds if they know the diagnosis. Biller is a master of this cerebral sport.

In this book, Biller has assembled a group of neurologists and internists skilled in 23 medical specialties and in 171 specific conditions, one for each chapter. The chapters are formatted in a uniform pattern, each focusing on a brief case vignette. The essays are comprehensive, and the coverage of topics is excellent. The book is also attractively produced. A novel feature is that the entire content of the book is posted on the Web; each copy of the book includes a password that allows the purchaser to enter the Web site, making it easier to search for a particular topic.

In the end, however, this is truly another textbook of neurology. The title might suggest a more limited scope, but internal medicine is an important subspecialty of neurology — rather than the other way around — and the chapters in this book reinforce that view.

The one major omission I found was the lack of a chapter on molecular genetics. If a reader searches the Web site for the Kennedy syndrome, for example, nothing comes up. If a reader looks for bulbospinal muscular atrophy or spinal muscular atrophy, the results are no better. Another problem I encountered was a lack of results when I searched for mitochondrial diseases, although this is surely an overlap with internal medicine. The outcome was no better when I looked for the Kearns–Sayre syndrome.

The appearance of yet another textbook raises a question, which leads me to disclose that I edit a textbook myself. Who reads textbooks these days? They are often too expensive for medical students. House officers and practicing physicians can go directly to PubMed for complete versions of contemporary articles that can be downloaded. The answer to the question surely can be found somewhere, because publishers keep on turning out printed volumes.

Lewis P. Rowland, M.D.
Columbia University Medical Center, New York, NY 10032
lpr1@columbia.edu