Surgical Recall

Great great book for classical surgery "pimping". Although I didn't use this book to study for the actual Surgery Shelf in my third year of medical school, I primarily used it to be prepared to answer topics related to anything and everything about the patient and his or her associated case. This book is like a rapid review of material with special topic-based questions and answers, making it perfect for moments when you're scrubbed in and getting quizzed left and right, all while trying to suture efficiently! A majority of the questions I have been asked were straight out of this book, so it's definitely worth it!

If you're looking at this book, chances are that you're rotating in surgery. This is a very good book to have on rotation. Depending on how experienced your attendings are when it comes to PIMPing, this will become helpful! But even besides that, the book is a very good preparation for your surgery rotation. Also remember that there is an Advanced Surgical Recall as well!

I'm a PA student and got this for my surgery clerkship. This book is great for getting quick answers to every pimp question you could ever have, and it is written in a pimp question format. So good for getting quick/answers/info, and pretty easy to use and super comprehensive in terms of coverage. It was way more than you will see in a single clerkship, so in a sense, may be a wasted resource, but I liked the format for this use case. I would not use this as a book to gain understanding or deeper knowledge however, it is more for a quick cram or on the go help during clerkship guide. I didn;t use that much of it since I only saw a subset of the cases in the book.

A must if you have a surgery rotation coming up. It wasn't too helpful for me for the shelf exam at the end of the rotation, however, it was very useful for looking up a couple facts before going into a surgery. Downside is that the book is kind of heavy and it weighs your white coat down, but I think you will be behind other classmates if you don't utilize it.

Great book!!! It was far more useful than I thought it would be. Most of the answers to the questions that I was asked during the rotation was in here. I read the other surgery books too but this (and Pestana's) are brief and to the point, making it easier to remember the pertinent details.

If you prefer a question/answer based book this is a great resource during surgical rotation. Though I didn't read it from cover to cover, they had great illustrations of tools and procedures. Loved it so much I got Ob Recall for that rotation as well.

A little too detailed for the shelf exam, but was great for answering questions on rounds. Plus its size makes it easier than other books to carry around in your white coat.

This book is pretty good in that it has the vast majority of the stuff you'll need to know in the OR. However, I think it has too much low yield content as well. It would be better to have the top few things you have to know for a particular procedure rather than pages of content which will mostly not be helpful. The depth and breadth of content is also stuff that won't ever show up on an exam. I also thought the information could be organized better; for example, in some places content is sorted by alphabetical order, which is less useful than organizing by type of content, organ system, etc.