Surgery: PreTest Self Assessment and Review (Pretest Series) (Paperback)

Written with a reckless disregard for the actual content of most surgery clerkships and of the Shelf exam, this book seems to assume students have completed both a surgical residency and numerous subspecialty fellowships. Many questions deal with fine points of surgical management that are not tested on the Shelf. (Know much about chemotherapeutic treatment for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma confined to the submucosa of the stomach?) Others have multiple correct answers or irritating "trap" answers of limited educational value (does this tumor have 70% or 80% 1-year survival?). Answer key sometimes seems off-topic or illogical (patient in question has MEN II, but answer assumes MEN I) or fails to directly address the question. If you have limited time to study--and I know you do--you would be better off looking elsewhere, for example to the questions in Lawrence's Essentials of Surgery. And keep in mind that the surgery Shelf is notoriously heavy on medicine.

Alexander's Care of the Patient in Surgery (Hardcover)

This newer version of Alexander's Patient in Surgery is not as useful as the older versions as they took out the list of surgical instruments set up lst for scrub techs to use as a guide line. This book shows a select group of instruments but the old versions had an actual list of everything you might need for that procedure.
I'm very disappointed with this change. Thank goodness I still have the older version to resort back to.

Small Animal Surgery Textbook (Hardcover)

Before my first spay, I watched the demonstration video a few times, read over my spay manual a few times....but reading the procedure over in Fossum upped my confidence in remembering each step.

I've used this book to clarify certain procedures mentioned in my classes, and it has helped me so much conceptually. The illustrations are great and provide a great model to accompany the instructions.

It's a standard for any vet student!