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Textbook


A textbook is not officially required for this course. All the information you'll be tested on will be from the lectures or from supplementary readings assigned from the scientific literature. Nevertheless, it's good to read a textbook. Each author presents the material in a slightly different way, and something that was confusing in class may seem simpler when you've read the author's explanation. The texts also have extensive illustrations, that are a bit better than the drawings I put up on the board. There are several excellent physiology textbooks around:

  • Human Physiology: From Cells to Systems, Lauralee Sherwood (Wadsworth, 1997)
      This is officially unrequired text for this course, and is available in the Lion's Court bookstore. The page numbers given on the syllabus refer to the 3rd edition, but if you have the 2nd edition (1993), you can use that too.

      NOTE: For students who'll take Physiology in Fall 2000: The 4th edition of Sherwood will be available mid-July, so wait till then to purchase it. A used copy of the 3rd edition is probably also okay, but the 4th is supposed to have improved, 3-dimensional artwork.

      Sherwood's web site has a section called "Hypercontents", where you can find additional on-line reading for each chapter.

    • Human Physiology: An Integrated Approach, Dee Silverthorn (Prentice Hall, 1998)
        The illustrations in this book are superb, but I find the writing a bit more simplistic than Sherwood's. This was used in Dr. Yang's class, so if you have a copy of it, you can use it here, too, but you'll have to use the index to find the appropriate page numbers.

    • Human Physiology: The Mechanisms of Body Function, Vander, Sherman, Luciano (McGraw Hill, 1998)
        This is also an excellent text, and you can use it if you have it. The drawback is that it goes into less detail in topics that I emphasize, and more detail on those topics that I don't.

      Histology

      The figures in the above texts show diagrams of the different types of tissues we'll discuss. If you'd like to see what these tissues look like under the microscope, you can check out some of the histological images that have been put online:

        LUMEN Histology, from Loyola University Medical Center
        Mammalian Histology, from the University of Delaware
        Human Physiology and Anatomy from the University of Nebraska
        Veterinary Histology, from Texas A&M University