Cancer Medicine, 4th Edition, Vols. I and II James F. Holland, Robert C. Bast, Jr., Donald L. Morton, Emil Frei III, Donald W. Kufe, Ralph R. Weichselbaum, eds . Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1997. Vol. I, 1800 pp., $189; Vol. II, 1800 pp., $189. ISBN 0-683-04095-2

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The first edition of Cancer Medicine appeared in 1973, 1 year after the birth of Medical Oncology as a bonafide medical subspecialty. The second and third editions were published with almost a decade interval. The fourth edition from 1997 has two major competitors, Cancer: Principles and Practice of Oncology, edited by V. T. DeVita, Jr., S. Hellman, and S. A. Rosenberg, which first appeared in 1982, and Clinical Oncology, edited by M. D. Abeloff, J. O. Armitage, A. S. Lichter, and J. E. Niederhuber, which first appeared in 1995. How do these three comprehensive textbooks compare with each other?

Cancer Medicine compares favorably to Cancer: Principles and Practice of Oncology in terms of detail and exhaustive coverage of topics. Most chapters in Cancer Medicine include algorithms for decision making, but nowhere near as many as can be found in Clinical Oncology . Unlike Clinical Oncology, Cancer Medicine does not employ detailed summaries at the head of each chapter and does not set off outlines of treatment approaches or personal recommendations from the main text. Thick prose is more the rule than the exception in Cancer Medicine , but this is hardly different from the DeVita et al. text. Both of these textbooks could learn from the reader friendly style of Clinical Oncology , employing more figures, algorithms, chapter summaries, and new graphic design elements. Future oncology textbooks should rely more on pictorial representations of guidelines for diagnosis and therapy and include roundtable discussions of controversial management points by several experts on a given topic.