Featured Neuropathologist: Douglas C Miller MD,PhD

From time to time on Neuropathologyblog, we like to feature a prominent neuropathologist. My staff at the home office has been working overtime collecting data on one of our favorite neuropathologists: Dr. Doug Miller (picture courtesy of Doug’s wife, Sherry). As many of you know, Doug moved from New York City to God’s Country about a year ago. He’s happily working along with Dr. Doug Anthony at the University of Missouri School of Medicine. Except for a recent Achilles’s tendon tear, Doug has been getting along swimmingly at Mizzou. The injury has forced him to take elevators rather than the stairs to go up to frozen sections, but he gets there.

Doug’s big news is that he is close to finishing a surgical neuropathology textbook. Rather than deal with the uncertainties (and missed deadlines!) of editing a multi-authored text, Doug is writing the book entirely on his own. Doug gave me more details on the upcoming book in a recent email: “The book is divided into four parts: I Neoplasms, II Non-neoplastic Mass Lesions, III Biopsies for non-neoplastic diseases not presenting as a mass, and IV Epilepsy Pathology. Part I is further divided into brain and spinal cord sections, and then of course individual chapters cover the gamut of tumor types. While this is a text, not an atlas, it is also heavily illustrated, with hundreds of photographs organized into multi-part figures. All of this is in color except of course for a smattering of EM pictures and MRI or CT pictures, but the large majority of illustrations are photomicrographs in color, with H&E, special stains, and immunostains. As this represents a distillation of my work and teaching over the last 25 or so years I deviate here and there from dogma as espoused by the WHO and others, but I think this is going to be a good practical diagnostic textbook of use to neuropathologists in training and maybe occasionally in practice, to surgical pathologists at all levels, and perhaps also a useful reference for neurologists, neurosurgeons, oncologists, et alia. The publisher is Cambridge University Press, and the working title is “Modern Neuropathology” (their idea, not mine; I liked “Comprehensive Surgical Neuropathology”, but they are paying the bills…)” The book should be out in time for the American Association of Neuropathologists meeting next June in San Antonio, Texas. Neuropathologyblog will, of course, feature the book when it hits stores next spring.

Doug is known as someone who is willing to buck the trend and go his own way. In an era when single-authored texts are almost unheard of, Doug’s willingness to author an entire text by himself is a rather heroic act. He is indeed an inspiration.

One more thing: Doug is putting the finishing touches on his book and is looking for a picture of a pituitary adenoma with gangliocytic differentiation. If any readers have such a picture, I’m sure Doug would gratefully acknowledge the contributor. You can contact him at the University of Missouri Pathology and Anatomical Sciences Department. Best of luck, Doug!