Adam Moreton, University of Liverpool

Unless ‘pathology’ really gets your juices going, then this book will in most likelihood satisfy your needs, and the examiner’s. For projects you’re better off with the larger ‘Underwood’ Pathology book. But for the PBL student’s level of understanding this will suffice. Presented in a reasonably readable style it deals with the potentially dry topic in a slightly moister way than other meatier texts. The ‘Integrated’ boxes help to reawaken knowledge from biochemistry, physiology, etc which is relevant to the bit you are reading. As you may have guessed, pathology doesn’t get me too excited, but I liked this book.

Posted 26th Jan 2009

David Miller, University of Glasgow

Opening a pathology book can be a bit like opening Pandora’s box, a chaotic bunch of microscope slides and broken body parts. Granted the differently coloured stained slides make for pretty viewing but how do you differentiate between hepatic cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. Enter King’s Integrated Pathology. For starters it’s much thinner than most pathology textbooks but I defy you to find a subject it doesn’t deal with in plenty detail for the typical med student – well not all of us can be pathology sages. Most students want to learn the essentials and if you come across a particular subject you need to cover more thoroughly then you can research appropriately with more in depth pathology textbooks. Included are a good spread of pictures and diagrams to backup the text and all are available on Student Consult. Downsides – well the prose style continuous text can make it a little cumbersome but it is well split into titles and all the detail is there. To summarise, Integrated Pathology is an excellent book for medical students, it would be suitable for serious revision but its forté is in providing a less complex broad ranged pathology textbook for general use.

Posted 1st Jul 2008