Tyldesley's Oral Medicine, 5th Edition

  • A. Field &
  • L. Longman
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003 price £32.50, pp243 ISBN 0198631470

The authors and Oxford Medical Publications are to be congratulated on the 5th edition of Tyldesley's Oral Medicine. This 5th edition has significantly changed and improved upon the previous edition. Many will remember the original book which was highly narrative in its style with virtually no illustrations. This latest 5th edition has been substantially altered with a pleasing number of high quality colour illustrations along with a readable and easy to use layout, including a significant number of key messages and easy to understand tables.

The text is quite long at nearly 250 pages and there has been a significant attempt to broaden the scope of the 5th edition. The initial chapter is devoted to the oral mucosa including its normal structure, and it is probably over ambitious to include all this information in sufficient detail in 6½ pages. There are also useful chapters on the assessment and investigation of patients although, again the information included is so extensive that some of it is inadequately explained. For example, there is very little explanation of why certain immunological tests are indeed useful in the clinical situation. There is also a chapter on therapy which brings together the generic information in prescribing for oral mucosal disease which I am sure will be very popular with students, and there are then a number of disease orientated chapters all of which are well written and informed, and the benefit of having specialist advisers for different sections of the book is quite clear.

There is, of course, the obligatory upside down photograph in figure 5.5 and last minute alterations have created small errors such as substituting figure 8.7 for table 8.11 in the text and disappointment that there is no figure 8.8.

Notwithstanding these minor observations, the text is well written, well illustrated, and well laid out, and the 5th edition represents a significant improvement on what has already become a popular and standard oral medicine text.