Abstract
The first, and probably the most important, thing to say about this book is that it represents something of a milestone in the progression of feline emergency and critical care (ECC) by being, to the reviewer's knowledge, the first ECC text solely dedicated to this species; as such, it puts the final nail in the coffin of the old wisdom that ‘cats are just small dogs’. Irrespective of one's personal opinion on the book itself, we must all commend the publishers, editors and authors on this significant achievement.
The content of this book is comprehensive (more than 600 pages, slightly bigger than A5 size) and a number of recognised experts have contributed as authors; furthermore the editors are very well known in ECC circles being highly experienced and very knowledgeable. The chapters are broadly divided according to body systems or types of emergency and it is very pleasing to see that there are specific chapters addressing the fundamentals of ECC – for example, initial approach, shock assessment, fluid therapy and pain management. Most chapters also include a recommended reading list typically consisting of journal articles or textbook chapters. There are a reasonable number of colour photos, radiograph images and electrocardiogram strips with the majority being informative and/or usefully illustrative rather than ‘window dressing’. The book is chunky and sturdy, and should cope well with lots of usage. As with the vast majority of current ECC texts, this book originates from the USA and some of the drugs/drug formulations mentioned may, therefore, not be available elsewhere.
Some readers may struggle with the formatting of the content. Although there are a reasonable number of useful boxes, tables and flow charts, the text is of small font size and many of the pages looks overcrowded and difficult to navigate. The majority of the text is formatted using various levels of numbering to represent headings and subheadings which can be difficult to read efficiently. Personally, I prefer to speed read paragraphs of text written as full sentences but even if the text is to be broken up, much more in the way of spacing and headings with different types of formatting would have been useful here.
One word of caution that I would raise about this book is that, like almost all other current ECC texts, the information provided spans the breadth of environments in which feline emergencies are seen, ie, general first opinion practice, non-referral dedicated out-of-hours practice, and referral practices. A fair amount of the tests, drugs and interventions mentioned is currently not readily accessible to many people and, indeed, may not be appropriate depending on the particular environment in question.
However, in conclusion, if you are able to get along with the formatting of this book and extract the information as it is relevant to your environment, it is most definitely a comprehensive and extremely useful new resource in the fields of ECC and feline medicine. There is much valuable information contained in this book that I, for one, look forward to referring to and I commend the publishing team again on this milestone.