Dominic Haigh, University of Birmingham

Surgery is an huge topic. Although the degrees of MBChB, MB BS and suchlike are commonly abbreviated to 'medical degrees' or simply 'Medicine', there a two parts, and they're Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery. Surgery is regarded as a separate entity to Medicine by many people, many of whom are surgeons. Regardless of this distinction, there's a lot of surgery to be learnt in the undergraduate 'medical' curriculum. Furthermore, 'medical' and 'surgical' distinctions dictate what rotations foundation year doctors take post-qualification. Bhangu and Keighley wisely summarise the entirety of what a 'medical' student should know. This includes trauma and orthopaedics, topics which are commonly omitted from surgical texts. The book is divided into three sections. The first is aptly titled 'The big picture', the authors provide a useful overview of a quick approach to surgery. This includes advice for the dreaded Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) stations, basic surgical principles, pre-operative assessment, post-operative care and surgical complications. A list of potential OSCE stations in surgery is a good place to start studying for finals, and the surgical sieve is a good place to start when you're in your OSCE examing your patient.. Section two provides high return facts, simply a list of 78 snippets of information divided into specialities which are likely to be asked by surgical consultants in their respective fields. These are the main clinical notes an undergraduate should absolutely know, a useful framework before commencing with the final section. Section three finds diagrams and images intermingled with the text. Illustrations are generally used in the place of photographs, which aids clarity immensely. Plain film, contrast radiographs, CT and MRI scans are used to good effect where it benefits understanding e.g. demonstrating the radiological appearances of intracranial haemorrhages. At times, the authors find themselves covering new ground almost incidentally. Nowhere else are you likely to find such a clear explanation of the indications for cardiac and thoracic surgery. This is the first textbook I've seen a head-to-head comparison of radiographs demonstrating Perthes' disease and SUFE make perfect sense. This book is excellent when used to learn the outline and main points of a topic or to recap prior to an exam. To go into a particular area in more depth it is worth dipping into a more weighty text such as Garden and Bradbury. To understand surgery, however, you will find it difficult to beat this introduction. Its strengths are its simplicity and accuracy, but above all its accessibility: skip through to any chapter in the book and you can begin learning there.

Posted 22nd Sep 2009