Customer Reviews

Lever's Histopathology of the Skin

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

From a Brazilian pathologist:
Positive aspects:
Some up-to-date references were added and the index is better.
Negative aspects:
Same old small poor quality microscopic pictures (sometimes they just don't match with the text);
Ridiculous number of clinical pictures;
The authors don't even try to bring light to old dillemas, they appear simply to forget "selected" references.
Disappointed!

Lever is widely recognised as one of the standard general dermatopathology texts, and indeed I believe probably has the longest history of any of the recently re-released competitors in this field. Having grown up on sequential editions of Weedon, I had never read Lever "cover to cover" until the tenth edition, so I have only patchy recollections of previous editions with which to compare this work, but I am not sure that there are any major changes: the current edition seems to represent an evolution rather than a revolution. The word which best characterises this book for me would be "workmanlike". This is a simple, traditional approach to covering dermatopathology.

The editors and authors have largely retained a mechanistically based approach to coverage of inflammatory skin diseases, rather than the reaction pattern based approach which has now probably become the dominant method. To assist the reader to navigate through this, there is an algorithmic section at the start of the book with references to the disease entities covered in the subsequent chapters. It may be my own inadequacy, but I have never found these algorithms useful in other texts (e.g. Ackerman), and I don't find them useful here. More annoyingly, the index usually sends one to the tabulated lists in this first section, which then refers you to the chapter you were seeking: effectively you have to use an index twice in this book.

Despite that crticism, the coverage of both inflammatory and neoplastic diseases is adequate in both text and illustration. There are moderate numbers of clinical photographs, placing this book somewhere between McKee (in which clinical photos and histological images share the stage) and Weedon (which has none).

This book is not wonderful, but it's not bad. It's unequivocally a class above Barnhill's text, but probably not as good as Weedon, though comparison with the latter might be somewhat more a matter of opinion. I imagine most dermatopathologists have a copy of Lever and read it occasionally, but my copy tends to sit on my shelf, while Weedon sits on the desk. If I didn't have a copy and could only buy one text at the time of writing (mid-2011), I think I'd probably save my money and pre-order the new McKee; my gamble is that it's likely to be a more beautiful book in every way and I don't think there's anything Lever gives me that I can't get elsewhere.

As a pathologist interested in dermpath, I really like this complete textbook with the quality clinical and histologic pictures.

Dr Elder did an outstanding job editing this excellent textbook.
The text is very comprehensive with great quality pictures. It is a must.

got the product in good condition, what amazed me most is thought i'll get it 2weeks after as what they emailed, but it arrived 10days earlier... reliable.
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