The Washington manual of surgical pathology has been edited by a team from the Washington University School of Medicine and is meant to be the surgical pathologist’s equivalent of the much older and famous Washington manual of medical therapeutics. The book has a range of contributors, from senior professors to fellows in the Lauren V. Ackerman Laboratory of that centre. Despite the multiauthorship, the style of most of the chapters is uniform and of a very high standard; I have found the book immensely useful over the past two months in daily practice. I have kept it next to my microscope and used it numerous times, either to clarify small doubts or for bigger diagnostic problems.

Most of the book deals with the …