For a general internal medicine text-book to be effective, two qualities are of paramount importance: clear writing and excellent organization. The third edition of Jay H. Stein's Internal Medicine has both.
The 2460-page tome with nine section editors and 391 contribuing authors manages, as editor-in-chief Jay H. Stein hopes in his preface, "to be a useful and readable reference to all levels" of readership. With the explosion in medical knowledge, keeping abreast of new developments in both the basic and clinical sciences poses quite a challenge for editors of medical textbooks. Yet this one is both encyclopedic and current. Included are such timely topics as adjuvant therapy in node-negative breast cancer, hematologic growth factors, and human retrovirus infection.
There are many standard internal medicine textbooks that can claim to be both encyclopedic and readable; the strength of Stein's text is in its organization and the resultant ease with which one