Clinical Radiation Oncology: Indications, Techniques, and Results

A book that seeks to survey the indications, techniques, and results of a clinical specialty has to confront a significant dilemma at the outset. Either it ranges across all possible acceptable approaches to its subject matter (in which case it becomes massive and encyclopedic) and risks turning off most readers, or it focuses on one specific school of patient management, which may be in the mainstream on some topics but clearly outside it on others.

Such individual schools of thought in the field of clinical radiation therapy began with Paterson's work from Manchester's Christie Hospital and Holt Radium Institute in the 1940s. That work set down in logical fashion the rationale and modus operandi of one of the great world centers of cancer treatment. Twenty odd years later, in the 1960s, Fletcher's group at the M. D. Anderson Hospital presented their approach to the same subject, also with a somewhat