EXPERIMENTAL AND CLINICAL NEUROTOXICOLOGY. Second edition.

This new edition of Spencer and Schaumburg's Neurotoxicology is greatly welcomed, since the original edition is now long out of date and a large number of compounds, and industrial, pharmaceutical and environmental agents have been identified as likely or proven agents capable of causing some kind of damage to the nervous system. This is a large encyclopaedic volume with 162 contributors and 1253 pages of text, and it must be said at the outset that is it well worth the price. It has several very practical indexes enabling the reader readily to get the information needed by various routes. Thus, in addition to the conventional index and a list of contents with responsible authors, there are two appendices, the first a catalogue of agents with their putative toxic effects listed and in the second the various toxic effects are listed with agents that might be held responsible. Furthermore, a practical addition to these catalogues is a three step classification of each potentially toxic agent on an experimental or clinical level, as to the degree of probability or certainty, in the authors' view, of the agent being responsible for the toxic syndrome. This A/B/C grading of probable responsibility is attached to the agent in the text and in the two appendices making it simplicity itself to find the agent and to assess the likelihood of its toxicity being significant. Another feature of this edition is the division of the volume into two sections. The first 105 pages deal, in three chapters, with the biological principles of neurotoxicity (Spencer), human neurotoxic disease (Schaumburg) and aspects of veterinary neurotoxicology (three authors). The advantage of the introductory chapters is that repetition of mechanisms is avoided when the individual agents are described. In the first two introductory chapters, however, there is only a limited bibliography …