Description

Now in its second edition, the Oxford Handbook of Neonatology is the essential user-friendly guide for all healthcare professionals involved in the care of newborns. Accessible, practical, and updated with the latest evidence, this is a key resource designed for use at the cot-side.

Reviews

An ambitious work by a remarkable group of eminent Neurologists. However the book neither lives up to the tradition set by OXFORD HANDBOOK series nor does it do justice to the authors’ statures in the field.
The book has all essential sections but they are poorly organised. This makes the books almost useless as a quick reference guide. Interestingly the American version of the same book (albeit with a different chief editor) is a lot more organised for quick reference purposes. The European/UK version has a lot less anatomy figures, poorly organised tables of contents and does’nt seem to have been written with students and residents/registrars in mind. It may be of more use if you already know the topics very well but useless to anyone using it in the wards for looking up stuff. Also the therapeutic aspects, barring a few diseases like PD or MS, is ignored. So the book is unlikely to help a registrar/resident who wants to quickly browse it for some drugs or some common drug adverse effects. You may think that inclusion of such extensive information may not be possible within the scope of a handbook, but then there is the Massachusetts General team’s ‘Pocket Neurology’ that does a wonderful job in incorporating all of such information and still manage to be exactly a pocket-sized handbook. This edition of the Oxford Handbook of Neurology also has no references/bibliography, so you simply have to take the authors’ words for granted (most handbooks these days give abbreviated references [PMID OR DOI]at least for stuff for which there are international guidelines).Flow charts and algorithms for management (for e.g., Status epilepticus or Myasthenia) are also absent and they all seem to have been simply condensed into bullet points.

The team behind the book is internationally renowned and they have been part of other great works like Queen Square Textbook of Neurology etc. So we can expect something better in the future editions