The pharmacological basis of therapeutics

LL Brunton, JS Lazo, KL Parker. McGraw-Hill, 2005, £85.00 (hardback), pp 2021. ISBN 0071422803 It is five years since the last edition of this “tour de force” textbook of clinical pharmacology, originally written in the 1940s by Goodman and Gilman. The advances in pharmacology since that time are matched by the sheer size and weight of this volume, and necessarily so. The difficulty in writing a clinical pharmacology textbook is the necessity of including sufficient physiology as the foundation stone to understanding this subject and its clinical relevance. This aspect is indeed addressed by the numerous expert authors contributing to this book, which contains …