New reference text helps reinforce UF's position as leader in critical care medicine

Two University of Florida physicians have taken the reins as editors of the leading text on critical care medicine.

Andrea Gabrielli, M.D., head of neurocritical care, and Joseph Layon, M.D., chief of critical care medicine, join the University of Hawaii's Mihae Yu, M.D., as the new editors of Civetta, Taylor and Kirby's Critical Care, a text first published in 1988.

The recently published book exhaustively covers issues affecting the care of patients in intensive care. Now in its fourth edition, the book internationally serves as a reference for seasoned professionals and physicians-in-training, for clinicians and researchers, and for intensive care experts and doctors who only occasionally are called on to help care for the critically ill.

"Every single professional who has an interest in intensive care medicine has read or owned this book sometime in his or her career," said Gabrielli, who was a junior resident when the first edition was published.

With all but one of the editors having trained and or practiced at UF and the University of Miami, the book is part of a Florida tradition and a testament to the strength of the critical care programs at those universities, the physicians say.

More than 80 UF faculty and affiliates contributed chapters to the book. Other authors hailed from noted institutions in 33 states and 16 countries including Italy, the United Kingdom and Brazil.

The new editors, who together also contributed to eight chapters in the book, took over when their mentors, Civetta, Taylor and Kirby, passed on the offer from the publisher, Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, to work on a fourth edition more than two decades after they began the first.

"We said ‘no thanks, we've had enough fun,'" said Robert R. Kirby, M.D., now a professor emeritus at UF. They are proud of what the younger doctors have accomplished.

"We were so impressed with their book — they improved all three of ours by an order of magnitude," said Kirby, who with his co-editors wrote the foreword for the new book.

The new editors credit their elders for laying a strong foundation for them.

"If this book is good, it's only because we've stood on the shoulders of giants," Layon said. "Those guys were incredibly bright, thoughtful, insightful — they are good humans as well as smart physicians." The book recently received favorable reviews in the journals Critical Care Medicine, Anesthesiology and Annals of Surgery.

"It is clear why this as well as the previous editions are regarded the standard in critical care," Mark E. Falimirski, M.D., medical director of the surgical intensive care unit at Indiana University Hospital, wrote in the journal Annals of Surgery. That's because the authors represent the three major specialties of surgery, anesthesiology and internal medicine, and as a result the book ably covers general critical care issues as well as discipline-specific ones, he said.

In the journal Critical Care Medicine, Rondall Lane, M.D., M.P.H., and Jae-Woo Lee, M.D., of the University of California, San Francisco, call the book "practical, well-written, comprehensive" and "a pleasure to read."

The 178-chapter book adds 30 new topics including bioterrorism, nutrition, disaster response, pandemic infections and use of technology in the intensive care unit.

"Critical care has changed dramatically, and as it has changed the requirements for students have also changed — the book has kept up with such changes," Gabrielli said.

The new material brings the latest edition to just under 12 pounds and 2,765 pages — almost 1,000 pages longer than the first edition.

Luckily, the weighty tome comes with a code that gives owners access to the full text online. So the book at once addresses the needs of people who look first to the Internet for information and those who want a comprehensive hard copy on their desks.

"People still like to have an old-time book that they can read," Kirby said.