Customer Reviews

The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 7e

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I have discussed this book in a comparative review of three human embryology texts:

Moore & Persaud, The Developing Human
Larsen, Essentials of Human Embryology
Sadler, Langman's Medical Embryology

This review can be found on the Amazon.com site under Sadler (ISBN 0-683-30650-2). In brief, I found Sadler to be the clearest and most useful of these three books, and Moore & Persaud to be the richest in clinical content but otherwise not as good as the other two.

This is definitely a comprehensive book with lots of illustrations and clinical correlations. But it is very dense and difficult to get high yield information from...at least in the time your typical first year medical student has to master embryology.

This book would be great for anyone going into pediatric or neo-natal medicine. Anyone else should look elsewhere for a more clearly written treatment of this subject. The book contains a lot of information and I found the drawings very useful. However, the authors use of unnecessary medical terminology makes for slow reading - and I have a BS in Biology! If you buy this book, be warned... you WILL need an anatomy book as well to understand what structures are being discussed. A medical terminology dictionary may come in handy as well. For information content, I give the book a 4 - I found several congenital conditions were missing or only briefly mentioned. For writing style, I give it a 2 for the reasons discussed above.

This is an excellent embryology text IF you already have some background in medical anatomy, morphology, or embryology. Otherwise I reccomend "Before we are born" by the same authors. Same information but less dense and more easily read by a lay audience. The Developing Human is a very dense text and it has excellent clinical correlations in each chapter. This is a book intended for medical or graduate students, so be pack your lunch before sitting down to go through a chapter. I like the illustrations, but some of them (the cross sections) will require a bit of mental gymnastics before they become clear - but once you get it, they are a very helpful way to understand how the 3D structures are being represented. The new edition has expanded some chapters, simplified SOME of the concepts, and most importantly, it keeps current with new developments in the field and nomenclature. I teach medical gross anatomy, embryology, and musculoskeletal system courses to first year medical students.

Although the information in the book is extensive, the organization makes it quite difficult to learn. The publisher would do themselve a favor to reorganize the book such that diagrams are readily available with the corresponding text, and to supply more thorough labels. There are typos in the book; unacceptable for any medical text.

Good book. Better than Langeman's (SP?), which is just a bunch of droning about pathways. This is more developmental biology on a macro level.

Moore and Persaud have a great book in the Sixth Edition. I think the 7th edition was put together by a mad computer scientist who was unable to coordinate text with graphics, and mixed up overlays between illustrations. With that said, I would purchase and use the sixth edition for test prep and review. It is a standard, excellent text, and the first seven chapters give a easily readable blow by blow of the developing human. Toss the 7th Edition; use it to warm your hands by the fire as you go back to the sixth edition and learn something. My .02.

I am a medical student at Texas A&M USHSC COM. This text is one of the worst I have ever owned. It is wrought with errors. There are numerous errors in the text. The diagrams are confusing and many are actually wrong. The wordy nature of the book is also a problem for most medical students, as the yield appears to be low (unlike Moore's: Clinically Oriented Anatomy). This text is listed as a required text at many medical schools, however, it should not be. Instead, I suggest *Langman's Medical Embryology. This is a much better choice for all interested in a clear and correct understanding of clinical embryology.

I highly recommend this book to all starters at embryology. But don't forget to buy an extra atlas, since the diagrams in this book need lots of imagination to understand.

I emailed the seller saying that I haven't received the book and he never even replied to me. It has been more than a month since i bought the book and I still haven't received neither a reply from the seller nor the book itself.