The topographic anatomy section consists of eight chapters that, in detail, cover the normal anatomy of the bones, muscles, blood vessels, nerves and lymph nodes of several regions. These regions are the thoracic limb, pelvic limb, head, central nervous system and cranial nerves, vertebral column, thoracic skeleton and neck, thoracic cavity, abdominal wall and cavity and pelvic cavity and inguinal region.

The section on BSE describes the signs of BSE infection, its diagnosis, pathways of infection, transport through the autonomic system, the removal of the brainstem for laboratory tests, the transmission of this disease to humans and the dangers of eating BSE infected cattle.

The special anatomy section, represented in tabular form, gives a very good summary of all the muscles, lymph nodes and nerves of the bovine. The subsection on the muscles provides a summary of the origin, insertion, innervation and function of each muscle. In the lymph node subsection the location, afferents and efferents of each lymph node are summarized. A further subsection, on the nerves, describes the innervation of each nerve.

The clinical-functional anatomy section is of great value. It describes the clinical and functional anatomy of the eight chapters found in the topographic anatomy section, and does so by means of text and excellent illustrations. In the Table of Contents the page numbers of the clinical-functional anatomy appear next to the page numbers of the normal topographic anatomy.

In the last section, that deals with the applied anatomy of the carcass, the different meat cuts of the carcass are described.

The second extended edition of Bovine Anatomy is a great improvement on the first edition and I highly recommend this book to bovine practitioners and veterinary science students.