3rd edition. Cassel CK, Cohen HJ, Larson EB, Meier DE, Resnick NM, Rubenstein LZ; eds. 1070 pages. New York: Springer-Verlag; 1997. $130.00. ISBN 0387946926. Order phone 800-777-4643.
Field of medicine: Geriatrics.
Format: Hardcover book.
Audience: Practitioners and students of geriatrics.
Purpose: To assemble and codify the body of geriatric knowledge in a way that is useful for both practicing clinicians and physicians in training.
Content: In this new edition, the material has been completely reorganized. In-depth chapters on theories of aging, death, and demographic trends have been included, as have good chapters on rehabilitation, management of patients in long-term care facilities, ethics, social policy, and medicolegal concerns. The number of chapters has been increased from 52 to 69.
Highlights: The chapter on incontinence is useful and well written. References, organized by chapter and subject, are copious and up-to-date. A small but useful atlas of color photographs has been expanded slightly since the last edition.
Limitations: The text has some notable deficiencies. For example, the chapter on hypothermia (a significant geriatric problem) that appeared in the previous edition has been omitted. Although much information is included, it is difficult to access, largely because of a poor index. For example, hypothermia, pseudobulbar palsy, and many neurodegenerative disorders are not listed.
Related reading: Although this book is fairly comprehensive and has extensive references, its usefulness as a ready clinical reference suffers because of its large size and inadequate index. This is especially clear when the book is compared with a text such as the compact Merck Manual of Geriatrics, 2nd edition (Merck & Co, 1995), which has a superior index, prints all disease names and keywords in the body of the text in boldface type, and uses Table indexing. Geriatric Medicine compares favorably with other standard texts in the field. Essentials of Clinical Geriatrics, by Kane and colleagues (McGraw-Hill, 1994), is a reasonably good clinical handbook but is already more than 4 years old. Care of the Elderly: Clinical Aspects of Aging, 4th edition, by Reichel and colleagues (Williams & Wilkins, 1995), has good, if somewhat dated, clinical sections, but topics such as cell biology and physiology and the demographics of aging are treated too briefly. Geriatric Medicine is an ambitious work and encompasses the body of knowledge needed to practice clinical geriatrics.
Reviewer: Isaac Kleinman, MD, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas.
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