Customer Reviews

General Practice

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I have the English version of this book. It is an excellent text exhibiting the wealth of clinical experience of Dr Murtagh. Common conditions (as well as not so common maladies) encountered by GPs are dealt with in-depth. Murtagh approaches the topics with a practical, clinical approach; the GP will find the book extremely digestible and applicable to their daily practice. I find the "common pitfalls" section very useful. It allows us to think laterally when approaching an apparently simple condition. If you need a book to enhance your clinical knowledge and skills, this book is the one.

It was published in 1996 by McGraw-Hill Portugal the portuguese translation (European Portuguese), ISBN 972-82898-17-X, entitled - Clínica Geral (4200$00 PTE w/ VAT) Foi publicado em 1996 pela McGraw-Hill de Portugal a tradução portuguesa (Português Europeu)ISBN 972-82898-17-X com o título - Clínica Geral 4200$00 PTE c/ IVA A practical 403 pages, pocket size soft cover manual, with a good coverage of clinical practice usual problems in a good translation. Simple and pragmatic approach of the most common daily life pathologies of a GP, from diagnosis to therapeutic approach. I seems very useful for young (or older) GPs, and for specialists which sometimes forget the most simple and current illness and treatments. I like it, and within the scope of this type of book I rate it as very good.

I must underline three major problems of the Portuguese translation: The search of a theme is extremely difficult. The main problem is the absence of a final alphabetic index - without excuse in a McGraw Hill edition. Secondly the fact that the initial thematic order in English was not efficiently changed and adapted now that the book is written in portuguese. Thirdly and again without excuse - the drug commercial names used are not locally used - some are not even marketed in Portugal. Final conclusion - in spite of the good scientific translation, the editor was not proficient in editorial matters envolved in a translation - like local adaptation and indexing - jeopardizing an important effort of translation. Maybe the market interest will be appreciated in terms of sales and new local editions will suffer of biased commercial projections. The editor should demonstrate more respect for national readers (may be that it is not the fault of the local country subsidiary, but of a short budget for local initiatives). The joy of finding a good scientific translation in portuguese of a medical text, which deserves our appreciation and total support, is clouded by these details, that in fact make the book difficult to use. Portuguese is one of the most widely spread language through Europe, South America, Africa and Asia, fact that is not usually recognized internationally, and is one of the official languages of the European Community. Please invest more in this kind of translations.