Book Review: Most Useful Textbook Award

Well loved and well worn.

A few minor adjustments.

Time and time again, ever since the beginning of the summer pathology course to even now, I have found myself coming back to reference and study from this textbook. It’s the BRS Pathology 4^th edition by Schneider and Szanto. It can be thought of as a condensed version of Robbins which removes a lot of the side content and tells you the main points behind each individual pathology. In fact, I find studying from this bullet-point style book much easier than having to wade through paragraphs and paragraphs to get to the bottom of my answer in Robbins. The information is presented with as little flair as possible which leaves just the delicious tenderloin meat of pathology left over. What would take me a whole day in reviewing an organ system takes me no more than 2 hours.

This book not only serves for me as a quick reference and study guide, but also as a practice review. The end of each chapter is filled with up to several dozen practice questions that hit the main pathologies from each section. The questions are in multiple-choice, which also helps us to review for our board exam once we graduate. The questions cover a good variety of topics, but the difficulty could admittedly be a little tougher. After having reviewed the entire book over and over and over, one gets to the point where just by reading the first sentence you already know that the answer is C.

As a book which condenses pathology into understandable bite-sized portions there are some pathologies which are glossed over or omitted entirely. It does a fine job at introducing most of the pathologies, but for the successful pathologists’ assistant, only knowing “most of the pathologies” is not going to cut it. You can see that I have made some “improvements” and have written my own notes within the book. Whenever I have come across a pathology that needed more elaboration or was not included in the book, I write it in myself in the appropriate chapter. Over this past year and a half it has become a much more personalized item and if there’s an entry I need to look up I know from my own memory the approximate page it’s going to be in. It has also been useful for me to write in non-pathology notes in the pages, for example explanations of different surgical procedures or surgical hardware/tools.

The last minor irk that I have with this book is that it’s not made from titanium. I’m afraid one day it’s going to disintegrate into dust and be blown away by a strong gust of wind. It’s only because I love this book so much that it is falling into disrepair. 

I think that many of my classmates will agree that this book has helped them immensely throughout both years of this program. As for myself, it will continue to be of use even after the completion of this program.