In his preface to the first edition to this famous book, published in 1898, Patrick Manson wrote, ‘A manual on the diseases of warmer climates, of handy size, and yet giving adequate information, has long been a want’. More than a hundred years and twenty editions later, what is often described as the bible of tropical medicine has come a long way, and indeed as the current editors point out, this new edition completes a fundamental change in direction for the book. What started out as a treatise on a limited number of parasitic infections has become a traditional multi-author textbook whose aim is to cover ‘medicine in the tropics’. As we shall see, therein lays the dilemma of all such large books: where to draw the line, what should be in and what should be out.
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Jonathan Cohen (2004) studied this question.