Book excerpt: "Human anatomy and physiology is a fascinating subject. However, students can be overwhelmed by the complexity, the interrelatedness of concepts from different chapters, and the massive amount of material in the course. Our goal was to create a textbook to guide students on a clearly written and expertly illustrated beginner's path through the human body. An Integrative Approach One of the most daunting challenges that students face in mastering concepts in an anatomy and physiology course is integrating related content from numerous chapters. Understanding a topic like blood pressure, for example, requires knowledge from the chapters on the heart, blood vessels, kidneys, and how these structures are regulated by the nervous and endocrine systems. The usefulness of a human anatomy and physiology text is dependent in part on how successfully it helps students integrate these related concepts. Without this, students are only acquiring what seems like unrelated facts without seeing how they fit into the whole. To adequately explain such complex concepts to beginning students in our own classrooms, we as teachers present multiple topics over the course of many class periods, all the while balancing these detailed explanations with refreshers of content previously covered and intermittent glimpses of the big picture. Doing so ensures that students learn not only the individual pieces, but also how the pieces ultimately fit together. This book represents our best effort to replicate this teaching process. In fact, it is the effective integration of concepts throughout the text that makes this book truly unique from other undergraduate anatomy and physiology texts"--