While our knowledge about cancer is proliferating rapidly, our principles of cancer medicine for individual patients and for populations are evolving only gradually. Our fundamental understanding of cancer causes and deve lopment is incomplete, and our treatments are nonspecific and less often curative than we would like. Nevertheless, worldwide, our major challenge remains to apply to our populations all that we know about cancer. To meet this challenge, doctors everywhere need a broad view and under standing of cancer causes and control. This book is intended for doctors-in-training and clinical medical practi tioners; it provides principles across the breadth of cancer medicine. The editors and authors believe that it is possible to reduce the exposition of current knowledge to the compact 40 chapters and 600 pages presented here without losing the comprehensiveness, richness, and pragmatic detail that doctors need. This compilation presumes knowledge of the basic sciences, particularly genetics, pathology, anatomy, and physiology. We have tried to balance scientific exposition with practical material in preven tion, early detection, and palliative care, which are the major areas of pub lic health medicine where greater attention is needed worldwide. While this book is based, in part, on material prepared for previous edi tions, each chapter has been newly written and edited by the authors and editorial staff for this edition.
