Customer Reviews

Gray's Anatomy for Students: With STUDENT CONSULT Online Access, 2e

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In short, this is an excellent book when used in the appropriate context. It is meant to be a textbook for advanced human anatomy classes that take a regional approach (i.e. med school gross anatomy); there is no better regional anatomy textbook.

This was the main text for my gross anatomy class, and the professor also recommended Netter's Clinical anatomy (which is rich in clinical content but not the best way to learn structures/landmarks). As a textbook Grays is very good; it has a great combination of descriptive and accurate text as well as fairly detailed pictures. Personally, I wish that it had more pictures with more labeling. The drawings are not as good as Netter's Atlas of Human Anatomy. Netter's Atlas, however, has no text, so I always use these two resources together.

Gray's Anatomy for Students was designed to be a textbook for REGIONAL ANATOMY classes. That is, students take a region (say Head & Neck) and learn all of the important bones, nerves, vessels, organs, and tissues in that region. A systems-based class, by contrast, teaches all of the important nerves in the body (across all regions), then moves on to all of the bones, then moves on to the circulatory system, etc. and not necessarily in that order. This is the best textbook if your goal is to truly master regional anatomy while taking a class. I am not sure it would be very useful for a systems-based curriculum so try to find out what your class involves before purchasing this book. Gray's also contains a fair amount of clinical content which is interesting, but may not actually be useful to you.

If you are considering Gray's for USMLE board review, it is much too dense and contains too much detailed information for that. For board review, get an atlas (I recommend Netter's) and a condensed text like BRS Gross Anatomy by Chung or High Yield Gross Anatomy. See if you can look through those texts to decide which format you like better. Even BRS contains way more info than you need for your boards, but is an excellent tool for mastering gross anatomy. I don't actually know much about the High Yield book. So, Gray's for Students is excellent for a regional anatomy class, not good for quick review. I should also mention that the student consult included with this book is great to be able to access the full text online from anywhere. It also allows you to download many of the images, which could be used for study and presentation.

If your goal is to teach yourself anatomy without taking a class, this book may be a good resource but is NOT the kind of book you read cover-to-cover. You will only be able to learn so much anatomy without taking a class (I tried before taking my class). Better and cheaper resources for self-teaching are the Netter Anatomy Flash Cards and the Kaplan Medical Flash Cards. The Netter cards are by region, and the Kaplan Medical cards are by system. They are both excellent.

this book is great for med school anatomy! great pictures and charts!! (for the most part...)

my ONLY problem with this book:

someone clearly forgot to edit the last chapter on the head and neck. which is a shame because this is one of the hardest topics in anatomy. It is so bad that i have found myself needing to use other texts (Moore's Clinically Oriented Anatomy-awesome book) to make up for it.

For example- some charts list wrong innervations and functions of muscles. In addition to clearly obvious typo's, it is a very poorly organized chapter which jumps all over the place. One second you are looking at the jaw, the next you are in the neck, and somehow you make your way to the nose. It doesn't flow well at all.

To make it even more difficult, in the later parts, when the authors go back to discussing structures in the head, such as the nose and mouth, they tell you to refer to previous pages from the beginning of the chapter. Those pages listed are incorrect, making it all the more frustrating....

and finally, although it will tell you all the functions of each muscle it does not tie it all in well. A simple straight forward explanation of mastication and other very important functions of the head would be very helpful. I know it's an anatomy book, but if it wants to be a clinical anatomy book, it NEEDS to discuss these things, even if it's just a general explanation in a small diagram on the corner of a page.

Also one thing it lacks is a final section on the function of each cranial nerve. All it has is a two page chart at the beginning of the chapter, but Moore's has almost an entire chapter devoted to this with diagrams illustrating everything. Gray's simply has the chart and discusses the nerve when it is relevant to the structure you are reading about. It is extremely annoying to jump around in a 250 page chapter when you are just trying to learn a branch of one nerve. (remember, the pages it tells you to go to are wrong...)

My suggestion- buy the book for everything else, and study the head and neck elsewhere... this book is a waste of time for it. (especially when you have so very little of it in med school)

This book was really good to get the basics of anatomy. However if you want more in depth, Theme (i think that is the spelling) was better, some of my friends had it and it was great.

This is an excellent book for an anatomy student who does better from reading a text book - as opposed to just looking at the pictures in Netter's or Thieme. It is a real textbook that breaks things down into their simplest components - things like blood supply to the abdomen are broken down simply by developmental regions. It is really helpful for getting big concepts and a basic orientation to the incredible onslaught of vocabulary and spatial memorization that is med school gross anatomy. However, it is a little light on the details. Some things are glossed over and not mentioned at all, most likely for the sake of simplicity. For an undergrad anatomy class, it is perfect. For a med school gross anatomy course, you really need a solid atlas to go a long with it to ensure you don't miss those pesky little details that anatomists love to toss into an exam.

I used this book during gross anatomy in med school and found it to be amazing. The full Gray's is just too long (1400 pages) and not written for a student - it's written for anatomy professors. It's dense!! This is much much more readable. Sure, it has a mistake or 2, but so does the full Gray's. But for a med student covering the entire body in 10 weeks - this is your book.

Bought this for my high school aged son, whom has great interest in the medical field, hoping to one day be a doctor. Looks like a good survey of the body as I expected, since I see the local medical students carrying the same around the school hospital.

This is a very readable text with gorgeous illustrations and uncluttered labeling. The text is very concise and easy to plough through even if you're short on time. It might not be sufficient for an anatomist or practicing surgeon, but for a med school student it's ideal. The online content is fantastic, with plenty of practice quizzes and reviews.

The downside to this book is that its "In the Clinic" green boxes often lack illustrations or figures that would help drive home the message. I hope that this deficiency will be improved in the next edition.

My med school recommended Moore's Clinically Oriented Anatomy 6th edition but I found it to be very poorly laid out, with messy and cluttered illustrations and page layout. For this reason I found Moore's to be awful to read, especially given that only a minuscule fraction of the content is required knowledge for med school students.

In the end I've stuck with Gray's as my main text and have only used Moore's for it's blue boxes that my lecturers sometimes like to quiz us on.

I was delighted with the book in the first few months after buying it. It was the simplest anatomy text I've ever read and I didn't even need an atlas to understand the descriptions, the pictures in Gray's fitted perfectly with the text and didn't contain lots of unwanted features - only the element being described on that page. For the first time in my life I really enjoyed the anatomy reading experience.

However, I still had to put it aside and start reading the detailed descripition from a real anatomy textbook if I wanted to be able to talk at length about what I've learned. I actually hate details generally but Gray's is simply not enough for a medical student, it contains descriptions that ar FAR too concise for my anatomy course purposes.

For example, the duodenum is presented in my (romanian) anatomy book in 8 pages and the authors of Gray's managed to describe it in half a page. That's both good and bad, but for me it was mostly bad.

All in all, I guess this book wouldn't be much fun if they added more in-depth descriptions, so as it is it remains ideal for beginners (a better title would've been GRAY'S ANATOMY FOR CLUELESS STUDENTS). But since after learning every word in it I still find myself not knowing enough anatomy to pass my exams, I resent not having bought some other anatomy book.

I love the book because its so useful and it explains everything so clearly. I only wish that the cover was a little more durable. Great pics

This book is a must have for all MS1 students great explanations and the online access is amazing! Worth it for the online access alone!