Hematology: basic principles and practice

TLDR: The sixth edition of Hoffman and co-authors' valuable textbook, which could well be the one to buy if you need one for your office desk or for the junior staff room, offers an authoritative narrative on the biology, diagnosis and therapy of a wide range of hematological disorders.

Abstract: Long gone are the days when a single author, such as Max Wintrobe or James Jandl, could single-handedly write a textbook embracing all that was known of contemporary hematology. Hoffman and co-authors have just published the sixth edition of their valuable textbook. They have recruited more than 300 authors, mostly from the United States, for individual chapters and produced a truly comprehensive compendium. They presumably offer an authoritative narrative on the biology, diagnosis and therapy of a wide range of hematological disorders. I say presumably because it was, forgivably I hope, way beyond my capacity to read the book cover-to-cover. Those few chapters that I did read, on topics close to my heart, were clearly written by experts, some of whom I knew personally, and all were informative and essentially error-free. The cited references, some listed under the heading ‘Suggested Further Reading’, were generally limited to 30, a feature I liked, but the full list was in many cases accessible online for the aficionado. The high quality of the diagrams, all of which seem to have been prepared especially for this book, deserves special commendation. Textbooks presumably made big profits for publishing houses in the past. Whether that is true today is less certain. The speed with which new knowledge is obtained in the 21st century and the pace of change of clinical practice do raise the question of whether a publishing house can really keep up and sell sequential copies of a popular textbook. And how precisely does one use the book which in this case weighs 5 kg? The answer, if there is one, must lie in electronic updating, an area where this book seems to excel. Once having bought the book, the reader can log into a dedicated website and obtain a complete list of references for a given chapter and update information on the topic of his/her interest. At a time when textbooks could be an endangered species, this could well be the one to buy if you need one for your office desk or for the junior staff room.