Editor Leon Schiff and his elite cohort of 42 contributors have created another superb, exhaustive survey of contemporary hepatology. Delicately I took Sheila Sherlock's recent (1968) version of "Diseases of the Liver" from the shelf and opened the fragile, prematurely aging tome to compare sections. The British offering has unmistakable charm along with breadth and the steadiness that comes with solitary authorship by a scholarly clinicianinvestigator.
But it is a Model T on a fast track with a Sting Ray; Schiff's opus wins all the blue ribbons. For example, his chapter on electron microscopy (by Schaffer and Popper—who else?) covers 33 pages, includes 16 electron photomicrographs and lists 181 references. Sherlock devotes 31/2 pages, 2 electron photomicrographs and 32 references (mostly concerned with other aspects of liver anatomy).
This is fairly typical. Moreover, Schiff has been judicious in recruiting his all-star cadre of co-authors: Rapoport on anatomy, Ratnoff on coagulation