Moore. Clinically Oriented Anatomy

[Guest Ian Wong]

Clinically Oriented Anatomy, 4th Ed. Moore, K. L., Dalley, A. F. 1999. Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins. Philadelphia.

 

ISBN: 0-683-06141-0

Chapters/Indigo.ca price: $122.23

Pages: 1164

 

This huge textbook is touted as the ideal complement to a pictorial anatomy atlas, such as Netter's or Rohen/Yokochi. The reason for this is that Moore's makes heavy use of text and very descriptive tables, while the coloured line drawings and small pictures are vastly inferior to the illustrations and photos available in the above two atlases. As a result, I think an atlas is almost a mandatory supplement to Moore's, especially if there is any gross dissection with cadavers in your classes. Moore's and an atlas give you extremely good coverage (with Moore's giving you the text and descriptions, and the atlas the pictures) of virtually any topic that you are likely to encounter in your med school anatomy classes. There are a number of clinical vignettes in the book to keep the reading interesting.

 

I used this book much more frequently in Med 1 than I did in Med 2, as at the time, I believed it necessary to learn pretty much everything we were taught. My original thought was that everything I learned would become clinically useful in Med 3 and Med 4 during Emerg, Surgery, or other rotations that make heavy use of anatomy eg. spinal levels of innervation for each muscle, exact origins and insertions for each muscle, and the names of often obscure and minor blood vessels etc. For this level of minutiae, Moore's is great, as it has a variety of tables for each area of the body describing the muscles, arteries, veins, and nerves to be found in that location. These tables are extremely crammable. However, by the beginning of Med 2, I discovered that I'd probably forgotten a good 50% of the minutiae that I'd learned the previous year. This was pretty discouraging at the time, but now doesn't seem surprising at all given the volume of information you are expected to absorb in med school.

 

In Med 2, I started trying to look for the big picture when learning anatomy, and tried to focus on clinically applicable areas of anatomy, rather than the entire scope of anatomy. This included learning the bony anatomy better, as it becomes very important in Radiology, and trying to figure out the spatial relationships between organs and muscles (again, very useful in Radiology, particularly for the slices obtained using either CT or MR). Quite frankly, for this, Moore's just doesn't work. A much more useful approach is to use an atlas for this task, as both Netter's and Rohen/Yokochi employ several of these transverse cuts. Moore's is simply too wordy, and for figuring out 3-D relationships between organs and muscles, a picture really is worth a thousand words.

 

If your med school tests you heavy on the trivia, then Moore's will be a good book to have, particularly for the very crammable tables (I used to mark those pages with Post-It notes, and go over them as a quick refresher before my anatomy exams in Med 1). My personal feeling is that this book could be very useful during your surgery rotation, perhaps when reviewing some clinically-applicable anatomy eg. components of the superficial and deep inguinal rings when preparing for an inguinal hernia repair. For this reason, I won't be selling Moore's until nearer the end of my clinical rotations, but I really didn't use this book enough during Med 2 (probably less than five times in total) to justify the space it occupies on my bookshelf.

[Guest blinknoodle]

Looks like amazon.ca has this on sale for 30% off (5e, from 2005).

 

See www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos...74-7480323

 

Personally, I found my anatomy class notes sufficient but I thought I'd pass along the great price.