The Nobel prize for medicine in 1977 appropriately recognized the importance of radioimmunoassay (RIA). This analytic technique, measuring small quantities of hormones, permitted endocrinology to take a giant step forward. This book presents the new diagnostic approaches, largely based on RIA, on a background of basic physiology and commonly encountered clinical problems. It also presents the essential technical aspects of the various tests (in vitro and in vivo) to enable one to request and interpret laboratory support intelligently and apply various clinical tests. Pictures, tables, and graphs contribute greatly to the text. The quality and mode of presentation are remarkably uniform for a multiauthored book (26 contributors), which is a credit to the editor.
The title Nuclear Medicine is somewhat of a misnomer, since a chapter on ultrasound is also included. Some redundancy, from chapter to chapter, on RIA and basic hormonal physiologic relationship may actually make the text more