Essentials of General Surgery [NOOK Book]

Michael W. Mulholland

This is a soft cover, easily portable, relatively inexpensive textbook on the field of general surgery. The book is organized around traditional surgical topics. A number of multiple choice self-examination questions and an abbreviated atlas of general surgery procedures are also included. The text has been quite popular with medical students and is currently in the third edition. This textbook was created because of the explicit recognition that medical student instruction in surgery has become truncated over the past decade. Students spend six to eight weeks in surgical clerkships in their junior year in most American medical schools, a time period much shorter than in prior decades. The editor postulates that an in depth understanding of general surgery procedures is not possible in this time period, and has sought to create a text that provides essential information for medical students not planning a surgical career. In addition, the text is designed to serve as a study guide in preparation for multiple choice examinations usually accompanying the end of the surgical clerkship. An abbreviated surgical atlas, found at the end of the text, can help to prepare the students, after two or three minutes of reading, for common surgical procedures that they will be witnessing. The atlas also provides information useful for all beginning physicians, including the proper way to conduct a sterile scrub, to don a surgical gown, and to prepare and drape a sterile field. This book is explicitly directed at medical students who are not anticipating a surgical career. Because the book is quite brief in the treatment of most important surgical diseases and therefore superficial, it is notappropriate for medical students planning surgical careers or for surgical housestaff or practicing surgeons. The level of sophistication in the text is not sufficient for these latter groups. This book is organized in a traditional manner, with beginning chapters dealing with broad surgical topics followed by organ-specific topics. Two novel and very useful chapters for medical students include ""How to survive and excel in a surgical clerkship"" and ""Ethical issues in surgical practice."" The accompanying multiple choice examination questions provide useful reinforcement for the material presented in the chapters. The mini-atlas of surgical procedures, techniques, and skills which conclude the text can provide a beginning medical student with a simplified understanding of surgical procedures and orient students in a relatively efficient manner for procedures they are about to witness. Most chapters contain tabular representation of important information and most also contain appropriate treatment algorithms. The reproduction quality of radiographs is moderate, due to the quality of the paper stock, and useful information is obscured in perhaps one of four. The coverage of general surgical topics is very simplified, without room for subtlety or nuance. This superficiality is a problem to surgical educators intent upon recruiting talented medical students to careers in surgery. Nonetheless, the first and second editions of this text have been enormously popular with medical students not intending to enter surgical fields. For every medical student toting around one of the larger hardbound surgical tomes there are ten with this softbound volume stashed in a backpack. With the majority of the medical students not pursuing surgical careers (currently about 85% of medical school classes), this third edition book is a useful reference.