This book is for students who plan to pursue such careers as nursing, therapy, sports medicine, health education, and other health professions. It is designed for a two-semester combined anatomy and physiology course and assumes little or no scientific background on the student's part. Many A&P students have never had a college chemistry or biology course, and others are returning after long interruptions to raise families or pursue other careers. With this in mind, I provide all of the background in chemistry and cell biology (chapters 2-5) that one needs to understand the rest of the book. Many A&P students also are still developing the intellectual skills and study habits necessary for success in the health science curriculum. Therefore, I endeavor to write in a style that is clear, concise, and enjoyable to read and to enliven the facts of science with analogies, historical notes, clinical remarks, biographical vignettes, and other "seasoning" that will make the book enjoyable to students and instructors alike. Each chapter is built around certain pedagogic strategies that will make the subject attainable for a wide variety of students and instill study and thinking skills conducive to success in more advanced courses.

The changes in this edition reflect an extensive effort to evaluate the needs of A&P instructors and students, to learn how well the first edition was meeting those needs, and to determine how it could even better do so.

We began our formal market research by commissioning 150 instructors, both users and nonusers of the first edition, to review the book in detail and submit suggestions for improvement. Another 140 instructors returned a questionnaire on the first-edition content, organization, and supplements. These reviews and questionnaires constituted a major basis for my revision plan.

We also contracted the textbook development firm of Burrston House for a wide-ranging research and marketing project. Burrston House organized focus groups in eight U.S. cities in 1999 and 2000, most of them composed of instructors using A&P textbooks other than my own, and one consisting of students from eight colleges. Participants reviewed the first edition in comparison to the books they were using and then met with Burrston House and me for several hours to discuss ideas for improving the second edition. This input was an important element in my second round of manuscript and art revisions.

Finally, Burrston House commissioned 50 of these instructors to review the entire second-edition manuscript during its development and 12 of them as an art panel to specifically critique the revised illustrations. These reviewers generated more than 2,000 pages of additional commentary that became the dominant influence in the final revision. Considering the two editions collectively, this book now embodies the collective knowledge, insights, and high teaching standards of more than 400 A&P instructors. Their influence is seen in everything from the size, color, and labeling of the illustrations to the accuracy and currency of the book's anatomical descriptions and physiological explanations.

A consensus emerging from this research was that instructors choose a textbook primarily by four criteria: writing style, clarity in explaining difficult topics, illustrations, and supplements.

I steer a middle course in my writing, avoiding two extremes: one of them a rigid formality that disdains, for example, any mention of "we" or "you," and the other a chattiness that some find condescending to the student. The students in our focus group, none of whom were in courses using my book, commonly said they wished the textbooks they were using had a more conversational tone. I feel I have succeeded when colleagues describe the tone as suitably colloquial or students say that it makes them feel as if the author were addressing them personally:

H. Burnette, McLennan Community College

D. Evans, Pennsylvania College of Technology

In this edition I have striven for even greater clarity through simpler language, more effective use of transitions and sentence and paragraph breaks, and more extensive use of bulleted and numbered lists to present related concepts and sequential processes in a way that is easy for students to grasp initially and review later.

If you are using or considering another textbook, the best way to judge which of them will better serve your students' needs is to choose some topics that they often find hard to understand-perhaps muscle contraction, action potentials, blood clotting, aerobic respiration, or the renal countercurrent multiplier-and compare the books side by side. Several instructors have had students themselves compare this book to others, and students have often written that they would rather be studying from this one.

The concepts that reviewers most often cited as especially difficult for their students were the muscular, nervous, endocrine, and urinary systems and metabolism. The key to getting students through especially difficult areas is especially effective writing and art. In response to reviews of these chapters, I developed several new illustrations, modified others, and fine-tuned the writing to clarify a number of points. Our final round of reviews indicated that the finished product succeeds at this task:

M. Gottlieb, La Guardia Community College

W. Jones, Loyola University

The visual appeal and artistic clarity of the first edition was the second most significant factor in its success. I developed many original illustrative concepts, and the professional artists then digitally executed these, as well as the classic themes of human A&P, in a captivating way that set an entirely new standard for A&P textbook art. Yet here too, our reviews and focus groups identified room for improvement: larger illustrations and brighter coloration, especially. Reviewers also widely reported that they feel the illustrations in A&P textbooks in general are getting too cluttered with labels, to the extent that it is difficult for students to pick out the key points. I deleted many labels from this edition so that students can more quickly grasp the essential points of an illustration.

The illustration program is more than line art. I replaced most of the histological photomicrographs and added scale bars when I had sufficient information to do so, and I replaced most of the cadaver photographs with a new set of very clear and skillful dissections commissioned specifically for this book.

R. Symmons, California State
University at Hayward