The Spinal Cord: A Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation Text and Atlas

Many hundreds of thousands suffer spinal cord injuries leading to loss of sensation and motor function in the body below the point of injury. Spinal cord research has made some significant strides towards new treatment methods, and is a focus of many laboratories worldwide. In addition, research on the involvement of the spinal cord in pain and the abilities of nervous tissue in the spine to regenerate has increasingly been on the forefront of biomedical research in the past years. The , a collaboration with the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, is the first comprehensive book on the anatomy of the mammalian spinal cord. Tens of thousands of articles and dozens of books are published on this subject each year, and a great deal of experimental work has been carried out on the rat spinal cord. Despite this, there is no comprehensive and authoratitive atlas of the mammalian spinal cord. Almost all of the fine details of spinal cord anatomy must be searched for in journal articles on particular subjects. This book addresses this need by providing both a comprehensive reference on the mammalian spinal cord and a comparative atlas of both rat and mouse spinal cords in one convenient source. The book is organized in two parts. Part 1 is a descriptive survey of the details of mammalian spinal cord anatomy, focusing on the rat. It includes 13 chapters with many illustrations from the leading experts in the field. Part 2 is a series of atlases of the rat and the mouse spinal cords. The rat spinal cord atlas includes drawings and photographs of transverse sections of each spinal cord level (2 levels per page - 34 pages), 6 pages of horizontal and sagittal sections, and a special section showing photographs of a variety of chemical markers (10 pages). The mouse spinal cord atlas will include drawings and photographs of transverse sections of each spinal cord level (2 levels per page - total 18 pages).