The great diversity of methods for manganese analysis in biological materials (serum, plasma, whole blood, urine, spinal fluid and hair) reveals the difficulty in measuring extremely small quantities of this element. An examination of these methods demonstrate that the most used one is flameless atomic absorption spectrometry. This review offers a comparison of the different instrument settings. Authors' recommendations for the collecting of samples are reported in detail. A description of the preliminary steps, the handling of the specimen samples, the preparation of the standards, procedures used, analytical criteria and perturbations is also included. Normal values and their physiological and pathological variations are also described.