Julia Ward, University of Dundee

I’d been really looking forward to this book being published, and it didn’t disappoint me. I found it very readable, but even more importantly it had really clear illustrations to show relevant anatomy, examinations and investigations, as well as on specific operations. I find that it can be difficult to picture these aspects though description alone. It provided plenty of detail on essential medical as well as surgical management, which means that you don’t need to refer to two text books to learn about a given condition. I really wish I’d had this book earlier, so I could have used it to revise for my finals, but I’ll definitely get lots of use out of it next year during my surgical attachments – I’m also sure I’ll be able to refer to it for years to come . I have a couple of suggestions for future editions. I thought that the section on surgical specialties could have been more detailed – the rest of the text book explains things so well, it would be useful to extend this level of detail to the specialties. Also, one of the features in the Principles and Practice of Medicine (aka ‘Davidson’s’, the ‘sister’ book to this) that I have found very useful – the extra index to direct the reader to ‘presenting problems’, was not included in this book. This would have been a useful addition, particularly for problem based learning courses or for those based on core clinical problems. Overall though, I think this is a superb text book and would not hesitate to recommend it to other students and I would have loved to have had it to use right throughout my pre-clinical studies.

Posted 1st Jul 2008