Burkitt. Wheater's Functional Histology

[Guest Ian Wong]

Wheater's Functional Histology: A Text and Colour Atlas, 3rd Ed. Burkitt, H. G., Young, B., Heath, J. W. 1995. Churchill Livingstone. New York.

 

ISBN: 0-443-04691-3

Chapters/Indigo.ca price: $101.00

Pages: 407

 

If your curriculum tests you on visually recognizing microscope slides, then this textbook is an extremely valuable purchase. As indicated in the title, this book is an atlas, and therefore is mainly composed of colour light microscopy slides and black and white electron micrographs. For this reason, it is a strong complement to the text-dense Junqueira. Unfortunately, I can't really recommend one book over the other, because they are so functionally different. It would really depend on what is emphasized in your curriculum and examinations. If you don't need to identify slides, then the text-based Junqueira may be more useful, and vice versa, if slides are emphasized, then the Wheater's atlas will be of great help.

 

Unlike the sterotype of text-poor atlases such as Netter's or Rohen/Yokochi, Wheater's atlas still contains a fair amount of text in the form of detailed figure captions for each slide. These captions not only identify and label the contents of each slide, but often also comment on their function. The book is divided into organ systems, and each chapter starts with a short text introduction describing some of the ensuing anatomy and histology.

 

Wheater's covers slides from every part of the human body, and often has multiple slides of the same part, but using different stains. This can often help when you are trying to distinguish details like a nerve buried within loose connective tissue, or picking out the basement membrane deep to epithelial layers. Without any doubt, this kind of an atlas and the associated knowledge of the normal microscopic appearance of human tissue would be crucial for an up and coming pathologist, and would be extremely useful for anyone considering oncology as well. For exam-takers, the visual images are also easily crammable, in that it is possible to skim through the relevant sections of the book as a refresher the night before the exam.

 

Something related to exam preparation that I and many of my classmates have had great success doing is using technology. Our anatomy department has a laser-disc viewer and a disc full of labelled light microscope slides. Browsing through this disc is like skimming a Super- Wheater's, in that while Wheater's has five slides of the tongue and taste buds, the laser-disc will have 30+. Searches for key words are possible using our program, and advancing to the next slide in the set is done with a simple mouse click. Therefore, if your school tests you on colour slides, but also has an accessible laser-disc viewer, then Wheater's becomes a redundant purchase. If your school doesn't test you on visual recognition of human tissue, then this book is unlikely to be of much use.