Avery's Diseases of the Newborn

With the incredible amount of information immediately available
on the internet, what ’s the value of a textbook? We believe
that textbooks, such as Avery’s Diseases of the Newborn, will always
be needed by clinicians striving to provide state-of-the-art neonatal
care, by educators working to train the next generation of
caregivers, and by investigators diligently advancing neonatal
research and scholarship. A textbook ’s content is only as good as
its contributors. This book, like in previous editions, has awesome
contributors.
The authors were chosen for their expertise and ability to integratetheir knowledge into a comprehensive, readable, and useful
chapter. They did this in the hope that their syntheses could, as
Ethel Dunham wrote in the foreword to the 1st edition, “spread
more widely what is already known … and make it possible to
apply these facts.”
We are grateful that the online content of this textbook enjoysincreasing popularity. However, we still find printed copies of this
and other books lying dog-eared, coffee-stained, annotated, and
broken-spined in places where neonatal caregivers congregate.
With each subsequent edition, the authors of Diseases of theNewborn help fulfill Dr. Schaffer’s vision of clearing the underbrush
from the last frontier of medicine in preparation for its
eagerly anticipated crops of saved neonatal lives. Textbooks connect
us to the past, bring us up to date on the present, and prepare
and excite us for the future. We will always need them, in one
form or another. To that end, we have challenged ourselves to
meet, and hopefully exceed, that need—for our field, for our colleagues,
and for the babies entrusted to our care.