Reviews and Notes: Oxford Textbook of Medicine

3rd edition. 3 volumes. DJ Weatherall, JGG Ledingham, and DA Warrell; eds. 4376 pages. New York: Oxford Univ Pr; 1996. $299.00. ISBN 0192621408. Order phone 800-451-7556.

Who has the gall to try to review critically a 10-kg, three-volume textbook with 4000+ pages? If you are eager to know, look quickly below.

With these dimensions, is this book a dinosaur that has survived out of historical times? Or is it simply a leviathan, a creature clearly living but so huge that it necessarily lags behind smaller and more nimble sources of information? The editors knew that these questions would be likely to come up. In their preface, they refer to such “jaundiced” views of the first two editions but …