Chiaroscuro and all that

✍ Scribed by JRW

• Publisher: Elsevier
• Year: 1991
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 261 KB
• Volume: 31
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0015-7368
• DOI: 10.1016/s0015-7368(91)73198-8

✦ Synopsis

Achilles' heel of the book; it tries to cover too many topics (it also includes Toxicology), and to do so for a diversity of audiences and grades (trainees and the establishment), paraphrasing furiously and pruning the verbiage, sometimes sacrificing too much and uncovering uncharted lacunae. It is presumed that the largely superfluous anatomical prologues, the column-inches devoted to the purely technical aspects of the autopsy and other post-mortem tests, and the various well-known reference tables are inserted for this specific purpose. Yet the neuropathological manifestations of closed head injury-particularly the features of diffuse axonal injury--could have been more comprehensively covered and perhaps illustrated by histological preparations. In passing, it is pertinent to remark that histopathology on the whole does not feature at all prominently among the illustrations. Slightly insensitively, deaths in custody are logged into the same chapter as the physical effects of torture. DNA 'profiling', (heretically referred to as DNA fingerprinting) is given short shrift. The adult respiratory distress syndrome and disseminated intravascular coagulation, so important and frequent complications of trauma of all types, are mentioned superficially.