First Aid for the Surgery Clerkship (First Aid Series) Paperback – 16 July 2009

This book makes it easy to review important symptoms and helps me make a better pre-hospital diagnosis in my general practice. Highly recommend this easy-to-read, in-depth overview of surgical topics.

for medical students it is just magnificant

Point form, easy to get through. Good basic overview to the surgery clerkship.

Ottimo libro , fa un riepilogo della parte chirurgica, molto più schematico e intuitivo di libri italiani. Fa un ripasso delle principali materie.

What I love about this text is the comprehensiveness. It has something for all the surg specialties and does a pretty decent job at capturing the most important information. It's full of eponymous that will impress your residents/attendings and facts that will help you on the shelf. I was able to get through the entire text and do the uworld surg questions and ended up with a 97 on the shelf. This is the ideal resource for outline learners. If you thrive on vignettes then look elsewhere. I can't stand case files.The only info it lacks is peds ortho, which is actually very high yield on the shelf. The fluids/electrolytes/nutrition section is on the weak side. The trauma chapter could use improvement as well. The appendix chapter lacks the Alvarado scoring system.

First let me state that I have in general been a fan of the "First Aid" genre. I used First Aid for the Step 1 with favorable results. I have First Aid for the Step 2 and am satisfied with it.This book is not as strong as the aforementioned two titles, but as I alluded to in the title of this review, there simply aren't many good surgical clerkship books. First of all, Sabiston's is way too expensive, bulky, and filled with technical details on the performance of surgery--not the ideal source for a medical student completing a 6-8 week clerkship course. Surgical Recall, by contrast, is too superficial--written in question and answer format, it is a better resource for "pimp questions" than conceptually grasping the material.In First Aid for the Surgery, I found a happy medium between those two extremes. It was more suited to the medical student, providing details of how to do a good preoperative physical and the basics of anesthesia, as well as the oft-tested topic of "when to do surgery vs. conservative medical management". The weaknesses of the book is that it was a lofty read for a review book and that a lot of the chapters were beyond what is needed for general surgery (ie specialty chapters on pediatric surgery, neurosurgery, etc.) I would have liked the book better if they had put more energy and effort into the general surg chapters and omitted the specialty chapters entirely--or at least integrated that info into the rest of the book. The specialty chapters weighed down the book as well as detracted from the otherwise logical organization of the book by organ system and topic--for that reason I'd only give it 3 stars.

I found this a good study tool for my third year surgery rotation. I used it to study the daily topics for lecture instead of the chapters worth of SurgeryScore they assigned. Gave me the high yield information in an easy to follow format.