General Surgery Rotation: Recommended Books

[Guest Ian Wong]

Here's just some recommendations for both textbooks and ward books based on my experiences in this rotation. I don't claim to know what's best, but this is what I used for this rotation.

 

Recommended books for General Surgery:

 

In your white coat pocket:

1) Tarascon Pharmacopeia

2) Maxwell's Quick Medical Reference

3) Sanford's Guide to Anti-Microbial Therapy

4) The Surgical Intern Pocket Survival Guide ISBN: 0-9634063-5-3

5) On Call: Principles and Protocols ISBN: 0-7216-5079-1

6) Surgical Recall ISBN: 0683-30102-0

7) Quick reference card for interpreting EKG's

 

At home so you can read up in your spare time (ha!)

8) Lawrence's Essentials of General Surgery ISBN: 0683-30133-0

 

Tarascon, Maxwell's, and Sanford's should be de facto members of your white coat until you graduate med school, and probably still after that. Add in the Intern's Survival Guide if you're a surgery keener, but can leave it out if not.

 

On Call will be a life-saver if you haven't done Internal Medicine yet, and are getting paged late at night by the surgical nurses for post-op patients with low urine outputs, post-op fevers, etc.

 

Although lots of the attendings HATE students using Surgical Recall, this didn't become the best-selling surgical book for med students for no reason at all. Figure out what you patient is getting operated for, and this book will have a corresponding section on the pimp questions you could them be asked while in the OR. This book is very useful.

 

Lawrence is overkill if you plan to stay the heck away from surgery once you finish this rotation, but it's a fairly good book. The big problem is finding the time to read it; it's not as concise as would be preferable if you've just spent 90% of your awake time in the hospital! I suspect that most non-surgical med students won't get through much of this book, and even the surgical keeners won't find enough time to read this, so if your school library has lots of copies, maybe try that out, or share between friends.

 

The major goal you should get out of General Surgery is the ability to assess patients that Emerg consults you on. This includes getting experience in your histories and physicals, in interpreting lab values, and assessing radiological investigations. For the general surgery service, this basically means developing a good approach to abdominal pain, and knowing when a patient has a "surgical abdomen" by ruling out other pathology using urine or blood tests (eg. for pregnancy), or by ruling in surgical pathology using lab values (eg. a cholestatic picture on liver enzymes) or a bowel obstruction using a three-views x-ray series of the abdomen.

 

The other major goal should be your knowledge of management of post-operative patients, several of which will need your help in one form or another before they are ready for discharge home. If you can learn a bit about good wound care, that will serve you well.

 

Ian

UBC, Med 4

[Guest Ian Wong]

Floating back to the top...

 

Ian