I am in the final stages of specializing in small animal surgery. One of our prescribed text books is Slatter, an excellent reference with lots of information for you to get lost in, not always telling you what the method of choice is for a particular procedure. Fossum is in my opinion a good summary of Slatter, leaving out all the irrelevant stuff. Fossum is like a recipe book for surgery, guiding you step-by-step with good quality illustrations through the majority of procedures even a specialist has to do on a daily basis. This book is a must for every veterinarian that is involved in any aspect of small animal surgery.
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Essentials of General Surgery
The book is organized like most surgical texts; it starts off with nonsurgical chapters on fluids & electrolytes, nutrition, etc. While necessary, they’re extremely boring and things start to sound the same (hypokalemia vs hypomag vs etc). First Aid and NMS tend to make better deliniations. After reading Lawrence, I still didn’t have a good idea how to preop/postop a patient (each case is different, but there are some generalities or bread and butter cases), nor could I easily reference this book for quick answers.
I spent a lot of time wading through this book, but in the end I don’t know if I learned much because everything became vague or nonmemorable. Each chapter has some multiple choice questions (weak) and a final Q&A oral review (good).
The surgery clerkship can be exhausting and time intensive. I wish I had spent my time with a different text. The surgery shelf exam smacked me a good one.
A better option would be to just memorize Surgical Recall thoroughly and do several question books or case scenarios (NMS Casebook). Surgeons for several years have been reading Recall. The Lawrence text I used was the second edition from around 2000, I believe, which is pretty old in medicine. Thank God they finally made a new one, but I doubt there’s an overall improvement in the body of the text.
You might get more out of this book if you focus purely on it, take rigorous notes, review it again and again, etc. but it will be difficult to find time for this, and in the end, your thoughts on how to work up an upper GI bleed might just turn to mush.
