Basic Immunology

In this updated edition of Basic Immunology, the authors continue to deliver a clear, modern introduction to immunology, making this the obvious choice for today's busy students. Their experience as teachers, course directors, and lecturers helps them to distill the core information required to understand this complex field. Through the use of high-quality illustrations, relevant clinical cases, and concise, focused text, it's a perfectly accessible introduction to the workings of the human immune system, with an emphasis on clinical relevance.

This book fills a gap at the interface of fundamental and clinical immunology, and allergy. For many years, experts in fundamental immunology and physicians involved in clinical immunology and allergy worked separately – but the fundamental immunologists did not have medical qualifications and the physicians were not involved in the field of fundamental research. Written by a teacher and an expert in both fields, this book combines current knowledge on basic immunology and immunopathology with clinical comments that complete the whole picture.

Hundreds of eponyms are used within the field of immunology—Petri dish, Crohn’s disease, Bence Jones protein, Kupffer cells, Freund's adjuvant, Ouchterlony immunodiffusion, to name just a few—but most of us don't know much about the individuals who gave their names to these terms. Where were they born and educated, what other accomplishments are they credited with, why has history chosen to remember them, or not?

The vast majority of medically important pathogens infect their host across a body surface such as the skin, or across a mucosal tissue such as the respiratory tract or intestines, as these sites are the ones exposed to the external environment.

This standard-setting textbook has defined the field of immunology since 1984, and is now in its Seventh Edition continuing to deliver the detailed, authoritative, and timely coverage readers expect.