There is a new trend in the education of audiologists that emphasizes the basics of hearing--Hearing: Its Physiology and Pathophysiology addresses this trend. It covers not only the basics of hearing but also the basics of pathophysiology, which is not covered in a comprehensive way in any other text today. This book recognizes the fact that the diseased auditory system does indeed function, but in a different way than the normal system. Few books have addressed the pathophysiology of the ear and the auditory nervous system. Most books on hearing begin with a detailed description of the physics of sound, which scares many readers away because they believe they need to understand acoustics to understand how the ear functions. Hearing: Its Physiology and Pathophysiology does not assume that the readers are physicists, which would be analogous to assuming that visual physiologists would need to know quantum mechanics to understand how the visual nervous system functions.