Customer Reviews

Handbook of Forensic Pathology (Vademecum)

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This small, spiral-bound handbook of forensic pathology is an accurate and concise manual containing all topics dealt within the forensic pathology/medical examiner setting.

According to the author, the book is intended for pathology fellows, residents, and medical students to aid in their instruction. In my opinion, the book would be quite useful to trained pathologists, medical examiners, and primary care providers (especially emergency room physicians exposed to forensic cases). The principal author is well-known in the field of forensic pathology.

All aspects of forensic pathology, including blunt force injury, sharp wounds, asphyxia, gunshot wounds, fire deaths, environmental deaths, electrocution, deaths in custody, intraoperative deaths, and natural deaths are covered in this small handbook. Many useful diagrams and tables are included, such as firearm pictures and related diagrams, body area charts and tables for thermal injuries, and several classic illustrated injuries which are encountered in a forensic practice. The forensic toxicology section is quite useful with a very handy table of various drugs with therapeutic, toxic, and fatal blood levels.

This excellent handbook compiles the most useful information found in the better known textbooks in a well-organized, easy to read format. This book will be my first source to answer a forensic question before referring to a full size textbook.

This work is not a reference textbook in the normal format of text photographs and graphic illustrations. It is written n a telegraphic style, with clearly defined headings, subheadings and lists of the important facts of every division of forensic medicine. It is in an easily manageable format with wire back-binding, which facilitate: the opening of pages without the constraints of the traditional hardcover binding. It is amply illustrated with simple graphs and line drawings to clarify the adjacent text. As a handy vade mecum this publication is ideally suited for under and postgraduate medical students.

In summary, an excellent manual on forensic medicine and pathology, recommended to all students and doctors interested and working in the field of forensic medicine and pathology. It will also be of value to lawyers who appear in inquests and trials, either as prosecutor or defense lawyer, where the understanding of medical facts and processes may be of paramount importance to ensure that justice is carried out in a fair and proper manner.

The authors are both doctors with an extensive background in medical pathology. The book is well organized and any person who may be a first responder to a murder scene (or death of any kind) will find this manual invaluable. There are 20 chapters and terms used are intended for basic studies, from handling bodies to methods of analysis.

As one peruses the annual you will find suggestions based on the doctors' examinations to expertise. Too often even the experts may come to the wrong conclusion by missing a step, during an investigation. Investigators should welcome this handbook as a checklist. It is an exceptional handbook well worth its cost.

I completely agree with the review of the reader from Jonesboros, GA. As a forensic pathologist, I found it useful for board review and also refer to it in my daily work for a quick glance at a topic. The section on gunshot wounds (chapter 8) has excellent illustrations of weapons with parts of the weapons clearly illustrated and named. This is especially nice for readers, like myself, who did not teethe on guns and may not know where the recoil spring guide rod is located to correlate with patterned injuries seen at autopsy. This book is a very solid, easy to read review of forensic pathology.

As a detective officer studying for a post graduate diploma in Forensic Medicine I found the book extremely useful, not only from a theoretical point of view but also from a practical stance in relation to daily police operations. The text is well laid out and each chapter provides easy reference. I would certainly recommend this book to any detective officer who for the most part, deals with violent crime.

The book is an outstanding reference for the criminal investigator and certainly those involved in the investigation of violent crime. The structure of the book is in an outline format, with twenty chapters, an index, all totaling 249 pages. This format is quite effective, presenting sufficient detailed information to allow the reader to understand the subject without drawing them into an extensive narrative. To support the text, the authors provide a number of drawings and photographs that effectively demonstrate underlying concepts or ideas.

Chapters Six through Nine are the true meat of the subject. They deal respectively with blunt force trauma, pointed and sharp-edged trauma, gunshot wounds, and asphyxia. Having taught death investigation and patterns of injury in college classes, I found reading these chapters delightful. Each chapter was well organized and concise in detail. What I liked best about this book, was that the format lets the reader quickly re-familiarize themselves with any given forensic pathology issue. Of all the manuals and publications I've used to prepare myself over the years, Dr. Di Maio and Dr. Dana's handbook is the best I've seen. For those of you teaching death investigation, if you have yet to find a functional text on patterns of injuries for your courses, I would certainly suggest this book as a solution. The bottom line is whether you've attended a single autopsy or a hundred, this book is a concise, easily read and detailed reference for the criminal investigator.

In my work as a paralegal, I have had the need to research many different aspects of a forensic autopsy. I have found the "Handbook of Forensic Pathology" by Suzanna E. Dana and Vincent DiMaio to be the most up-to-date and complete guide to forensic science available anywhere. The current edition (black cover) is the same as their previously published edition (red cover) -- only the cover has been changed. The book addresses all major fatality categories providing clear, explicit text with a wealth of photographs and illustrations. The layman in any field of medicine and/or law research or your novelist needing a background of medical information will need to add this book to their library. I have consulted and used passages/information from its pages many times and will continue to do so, as it is the only book on forensic pathology that provides concise, yet thorough, answers to all questions pertaining to this field.