Reviewer:Vincent F Carr, DO, MSA, FACC, FACP (Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences)
Description:Everything you need to remember is here, presented in a gentle, probing, Socratic method. This is a great way to study or review general medicine concepts. A third edition, the first was published in 1999 and the second in 2003.
Purpose:This book is intended to prepare third and fourth year medical students for medicine clerkship rotations giving them the basics of diagnosis and treatment for the commonly encountered diseases. It removes much of the extraneous material common in standard texts and cleverly defines the bare essentials of medicine.
Audience:The previous editions were getting too large to be called pocket editions, so the editor separated the single book into two. This one is focused on third and fourth year medical students to prepare them for inpatient medicine clinical rotations.
Features:The book uses a two-column, Socratic method of posing questions in one column and answering them in the second. This allows students to review their current knowledge and immediately see if they have the concept correct. It is simple and extraordinarily effective. Each chapter includes a number of definitions and abbreviations and a section of the "Major Trials" upon which many of the current therapies are based. The index is helpful and complete. For purposes of preparing for step examinations, there are many pertinent formulae used in physiologic calculations.
Assessment:This is one of the most useful books available for medical students to prepare for their medicine clinicalrotations and for review. I highly recommend it to students and residents, although there is also book focused on residency level students, Advanced Medicine Recall (Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2009) .