Case Studies in Neuroscience

by Ralph F. Jozefowicz, MD, and Robert G. Holloway, MD, 230 pp, ill, Philadelphia, F.A. Davis, 1999, $24.95

This book, designed for first-year medical students, was developed from case studies used at the University of Rochester as part of the first-year Neural Science course. It consists of 27 brief case studies designed to teach clinical–anatomic correlation. Each case is preceded by definitions of key clinical terms and followed by a series of questions, with detailed answers supplied by the authors.

The book is very easy to read, and does an excellent job of covering the most important areas of neuroanatomy and neurophysiology concisely. More importantly, it accomplishes this in a clinically relevant fashion that will remind medical students that there is some practical use to the many details of neuroanatomy that they have been working so hard to learn. Cases include “The burned barbecue chef,” with syringomyelia, “The tremulous dentist,” with PD, “The blind beautician,” with MS, and so on. Other covered topics include herniated disks, lateral medullary infarct, middle cerebral artery infarct, ALS, Huntington’s disease, acoustic neuroma, pituitary adenoma, epilepsy, and AD. Cases are often accompanied by an MRI or CT scan when appropriate. Several gross pathology photographs and an occasional EEG, evoked potential, and fundus photograph, are also included. There are also numerous helpful schematic diagrams.

There is room for improvement, as with all first edition books. It would be helpful to label the MRI and CT scans (I suspect many students cannot find the hippocampal atrophy without this), and the schematic diagrams could be drawn more realistically (i.e., with Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas drawn on an outline of a brain, not a straight-lined schematic). Definitions may be more appropriately …