Fever: Basic Mechanisms and Management

The second edition of Dr Mackowiak's comprehensive monograph on fever appears 6 years after the first. This edition is even more comprehensive, containing 37 chapters, compared with 20 in the first edition, and adds chapters on new advances, mainly in molecular biology. Many, but not all, of the clinical chapters have been updated. The initial chapters on the history of thermometry are interesting, informative, and well written and remain pretty much as they were in the first edition. The basic mechanisms portion of the book has been thoroughly updated and is first class. It includes chapters on cytokines as endogenous pyrogens, prostaglandin E₂, heat shock proteins, and many other entities. Jeffrey Hasday contributes an interesting chapter about the influence of fever on host defense, laying the foundation for discussions in future chapters of whether fever should be treated symptomatically. The references, for the most part, include publications through the