Table of Contents   All Chapters

PREFACE

    As with the first edition of this text, we have aimed to provide a comprehensive book that should have value for practitioners at many levels of dermatological knowledge; including dermatologists and their trainees, primary care or generalists and their trainees, as well as medical students. We have retained the main features of a detailed text and copious high quality illustrations. The more common disorders now benefit from a larger selection of pictures demonstrating the range of presentations and variations of any one disorder.

    Each chapter opening now has a new box feature outlining the topics discussed and the sequence and hierarchy of headings. Many chapters are complete in themselves, but to avoid excessive duplication across chapters, we have used extensive cross-referencing. However, in other instances there are some topics that are briefly discussed in more than one place in order that relevant disorders can be covered within a specific chapter. The new CD-ROM that accompanies the book will also augment the ability to search for specific disorders in the text or as illustrations.

    The overall layout is similar to the first edition but we have replaced about 30% of the pictures, including several new line illustrations. There are three new chapters that provide an overview of topical, systemic and physical therapies. Within each chapter we have again concentrated on diagnosis and management, but have added new information about pathogenesis to many sections. We have also specifically added major sections on differential diagnosis, with much more extensive use of bullet points and tables to explain features that favor one diagnosis over another. We have also summarized some salient diagnostic and therapeutic issues in the format of boxed ‘Practice Points’; many of these highlighting common diagnostic dilemmas or therapeutic pitfalls. We hope that all of these changes will prove useful to the reader and will increase the reference value of the text.

    Although most of the images are our own, as in the first edition we owe a great debt to those who have allowed us to use photographs of their patients. Individual contributors are acknowledged in the relevant figure legends, but special thanks go to Bill Paterson, Cliff Lawrence, Nick Reynolds, Mary Carr, Chris Stevenson,Tanya Foreman, Dale Collins, Raj Natarajan, Sheena Russell, Belinda Stanley, Elisabeth Higgins, Stephen Ducatman, Theodore Sebastian, Michael Murphy, Gerald Weinstein, Gary Cole, James Steger, Graham Putnam, James Rasmussen, Angelito Arias, Leo Barco, Ian Coulson and Goutam Dawn.

    We would also like to thank all those at Elsevier who have been involved at various stages with this project, including Sue Hodgson, Hilary Hewitt, Charlotte Mossop, Shuet-Kei Cheung, Karen Bowler and Rory MacDonald. We would not have achieved this project without the support of our families, Gwen, Olivia and Benjamin White, and Fiona, David and Kathy Cox – they all deserve a special vote of thanks.

     Gary M. White and Neil H. Cox

White/Cox: Diseases of the Skin, 2ed.(c) 2006, Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.