Oxford Desk Reference: Clinical Genetics

Reading this handbook of " Cardiothoracic " surgery, I am reminded of the Peter Cook & Dudley Moore sketch about the one legged man auditioning for the role of Tarzan: " I love your right leg … I have nothing against your right leg … unfortunately neither do you! " Well, I have nothing against the cardiac surgery side of this book, it is excellent. Unfortunately the Thoracic component is almost non-existent. There are 769 pages in the book: 620 cover the 5 operations that Cardiac surgeons perform and the other 149 cover the 105 operations Thoracic surgeons do on a regular basis. This is hardly a criticism of the authors as it rather accurately reflects the knowledge and practice of " Cardiothoracic " surgery in these islands. I understand that to cover Thoracic in detail, as the authors have done for Cardiac surgery in this text, would take a number of thousands of pages and they would have had to acknowledge at least one recognised practitioner of general Thoracic surgery. In 149 pages they could only be expected to provide a book of lists and that is what they have done. The lists look like they have come from an aging text on Thoracic surgery. Some of the items are clearly wrong and many more are misleading. The Cardiac portion is well organised, logical and provides an excellent basis for a senior house officer to begin his Cardiac surgical training. It has excellent descriptions of physiology, anatomy and pathology, surgical knots, how to harvest veins, how to do very complex Cardiac surgery. It even has quite a section on the somewhat avant-garde techniques of minimally invasive Cardiac surgery. Unfortunately there are a number of inaccuracies in the cardiac section, some trivial but others potentially fatal. For the next edition, the authors would be well advised to take feedback from practising registrars to correct the inaccuracies in Cardiac surgery and to take a guillotine at page 620 and cut out any reference to Thoracic surgery altogether. They would then have an excellent handbook on Cardiac surgery for a junior doctor taking up a post in that sub-speciality. Clinical genetics is a relatively young speciality dealing with genetic disorders of all organ systems affecting all age groups. To say writing a comprehensive and useful book for clinical geneticists is a Herculean task is like stating the obvious. The authors of Oxford …