Introduction

Abstract

For eight decades the Primer on the Rheumatic Diseases has been the standard text from which most medical students and house officers have learned rheumatology. I myself will never forget thumbing through an older edition of the Primer as a second-year resident, while waiting to review a perplexing patient with my tutor. Fortunately the tutor was running late with his own patients, so I had time to flip through the book — then much thinner — a couple of times. While turning the pages, perusing the features of those diseases whose names were still exotic to me, and considering my patient’s history of conductive hearing loss and pulmonary nodules, a light went on when I stumbled eventually on a particular chapter. I still remember the jaw-dropping effect on my tutor of my announcement then that I had a patient with Wegener’s granulomatosis. I think I became a rheumatologist that very moment!