Clinical neurology, a Primer Peter Gates, Churchill Livingstone, Sydney, 2010, 403 pp., ISBN 9780729539357, RRP $AUD 94.95 (online $AUD 85.46).
General textbooks of neurology are usually first taken up by neurology registrars in training and are referred to repeatedly and often acquired in successive new editions throughout their career. For students and others interested in neurology, such books of at least a thousand pages are hardly a consideration, and they look to smaller more digestible books. Most of those are of little use.
Many years ago WB Matthews produced a little book, text only, called ‘Practical Neurology’. It had chapters on headache and arm pain, and some great wisdom was distilled into those succinct chapters. It was beautifully written. ‘‘The patient who says that the pin is not what he would call sharp doctor, anywhere on his body, is suffering from an ineradicably mistaken notion of the purpose of the examination.’’ Purpose is very much to the point in a textbook on neurology. That book was probably directed to the harried British general physician who had to deal with a lot of neurology and already knew a great deal. For the well trained modern neurologist it was more an entertainment, and can’t have been much use to a beginner.