Customer Reviews

Langman's Medical Embryology

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I needed to build an embryology reference library for my own writing purposes, and bought three books at once from Amazon.com: Sadler, Moore & Persaud (The Developing Human, ISBN 0-7216-6974-3), and Larsen (Essentials of Human Embryology, ISBN 0-443-07514-X). Of the three, I keep gravitating toward Sadler as the most useful.

Although the other two are beneficial for more detailed accounts, Sadler gives the quickest and clearest grasp of the essential points. Sadler and Larsen write with more lucid prose and have a clearer conceptual flow than Moore & Persaud, but Sadler has the advantage of brevity for readers who do not need the minutiae.

Sadler also outshines the other two books in the clarity and color schemes of the line art (although not in number of illustrations). The art and photography in this book make the complex 3-dimensional changes of embryology as easy to visualize as one could hope. I find the pink and yellow color scheme in much of Moore & Persaud's line art, and the pink cast of many of the fetal photographs, unappealing.

Larsen is the only one of these books with a glossary. Sadler and Moore are the only ones with clinical case studies to test the reader's insight and problem-solving ability; both offer an appendix of solutions to the clinical problems. All three books have clinical application sidebars or chapter sections. The clinical applications in Moore are especially numerous, perhaps even to the point of distraction as they sometimes overshadow the main text. All three books have bibliographies for further reading on each chapter, with the larger Larsen and Moore books offering somewhat more references than Sadler.

If one does not need to get very deeply into embryology but needs an efficient overview of essential points, I recommend the compact and handy Sadler book above the others. For more depth, but with comparably clear writing, I recommend Larsen. Moore and Persaud, in my impression, is the least clearly written and least well illustrated, but the richest in clinical content.

This textbook, now in its 8th edition is a classic. It is extensive and rather than giving a simple step by step account of development (although this is provided in nice tables at the front of the book) it encompasses a more scientific explanation than is found in other embryology texts. It is fairly wordy, but it is easy to pick out relevent information and diagrams are excellent, being numerous, well labelled and easy to understand. This textbook, which is both easy to understand and extensive makes it an excellent buy both for a medical student just beginning embryology, and later on when a more detail may be needed. The book has beautiful photographs which captivate the reader, and there are also nice clinical boxes which break up the text nicely and are also accompanied by photographs. At the end of each chapter are problem solving exercises for which answers are provided at the end of each chapter. This is the embryology textbook to buy. I wouldn't recommend any other. It will keep you company through medical school and beyond.

I first bought Moore & Persaud's Embryology for the colorful pictures and the easy-to-read font but I soon realised that although the illustrations were good for those of us that depend on a pictorial memory, the text that accompanied it didn't completely explain some of the more complicated concepts and a few of the pictures are also apparently incorrect. I started falling back when everyone with Larsen seemed to love Embryo and I hated it 4 weeks into session. I then got myself a Larsen but soon realised that it too wasn't the book for me (although I know many that swear by it). Larsen, I found was very repetitive and I'd often find myself reading a near-identical paragraph two pages on from one I'd just read. I also found that Larsen tends to deviate from a topic through his paragraphs and talks about other things that would happen at that particular stage of development (which is good in some cases but gets annoying when you'd like to take one structure and follow it through from the beginning to the end without being confused by OTHER things that are happening at the same time) I then stumbled across Langman in the histology lab when I saw the lab assistant using it. Since I found myself once again confused with Embryo, I bought a Langman while on holiday in Sri Lanka for half the price and never looked back. Langman clearly compartmentalizes the topics and minimizes deviating onto other structures while describing the development one concerned unless it is directly relevant. I found it much clearer and easier to understand. Unlike the clutter of images that Larsen would leave in my head, Langman left a smooth chain of thought which was easy to recall. I also found that Langman's summaries at the end of each chapter (although not being as comprehensive as Larsen's) were still pretty good. It also had some information that was not in either Larsen or Moore. But above all, it takes the biscuit for its simple yet awesome three-dimensional CG diagrams, that are unbeatable for those of us who are poor at 3D visualization (ATARI over PS2 anyday!!). The diagrams are perfect for a comprehensive picture of the 7 pages of text that I'd have to sift through if I read Larsen. It also has really good clinical correlations and photographs of numerous congenital diseases and abnormalities. Overall, I'd reccomend this book as my first choice for an embryo text book. It took me nearly 3 sessions to find out the hard way; don't make the same mistake I did. Anyone wanna buy my Moore's? Cheers...

Langman's Medical Embryology is an institution - and with good right. Medical embryology is not necessarily an easy subject. The medical student will need all his or hers 3D imagination skills to understand how the human body is formed.

Langman's is written in a clear and concise English. Often, when studying medical text books, you get the impression that the author has done his very best to make it hard to understand - just so you will know how clever he is. Langman's is not like that at all !

The illustrations are very well done and the scanning electron micrographs are simply beautiful.

Overall, Langman's Medical Embryology is probably as close as we get to the perfect medical text book.

For your information, I am a third year medical student at the University of Copenhagen.

So this is my book for my medical embryology course that I am taking right now, and I am extremely happy that I had an undergrad developmental biology course! It would be a pretty good book (3-4 stars) if it didn't contain an average of 4 mistakes per chapter (seriously). For example, in chapter 3, the secondary follicle is (wrongly) called a preantral follicle in a figure caption. In the text, the primary follicle is called a preantral follicle (which is correct). If you didn't know already, this book would just confuse you. In chapter 5, figure 5-4 will confuse you because figure 5-4b and 5-4c are reversed, both in the figure and in the caption. The effect of this error is a major one, leading you to believe that notochord development happens in a caudal to cranial direction when in fact it occurs in a cranial to caudal direction. In the text, it is stated correctly. Once again, if you don't know any better, you are just going to get confused by this book. Somatic and splanchnic mesoderm are confused by the author, an elementary mistake. Also, the editors must have been overly concerned with keeping the book small because the glossary of key terms doesn't even have definitions for primordial, primary, and secondary follicles, mesentery, and peritoneum. That is horrible for an embryology book and ends up costing you more time looking up definitions that aren't there. The dictionary should be abandoned. Also, even bolded words such as alpha-fetoprotein are left out of the INDEX. Piss-poor for a book in its tenth edition, and the sad thing is, this is supposed to be the best medical embryology text out there. . . .

Aside from the obvious lack of effort in editing, this book has several good things about it. Despite being a tiny book, there is a lot of information packed into very dense writing. Some parts do not flow very linearly, which can be confusing. Other areas of embryogenesis are written poorly (e.g. progression of the villi from primary to tertiary, changes in fetal/maternal blood circulation), but you can still manage to get the idea if you spend a little extra time on it. After slowly reading through, and barring any crazy typos, you will have a pretty clear albeit abbreviated picture of medical embryology. Also, The emphasis on clinical correlations is very nice and well written. There are many good figures for the clinical correlations (it is the other figures that are iffy, as described above). The CD that comes with the book is very nice too and is the only thing that makes me give this book 2 stars instead of one for all of the mistakes in the text. It is cartoonish, but it animates VERY clearly what is going on during different embryonic periods of development.

All in all, I suspect you'll have to get this book if it is required. Just remember to be cautious of errors, especially in the figures. Maybe by the 11th edition all the kinks will finally get worked out. I doubt it.

Note: I abandoned this book for Before We Are Born: Essentials of Embryology and Birth Defects With STUDENT CONSULT Online Access (Before We Are Born: Essentials of Embryology & Birth Defects). I found this book to be almost identical in coverage and better written and edited. Moore, author of Clinically Oriented Anatomy, better correlates embryological structure to adult anatomy, which I think illustrates the clinical importance of embryology and makes it easier to learn.

i've found some errors when i opened embryology class. i hope this erratum has found to be helpful.

p208-p458 p215 Fig. 11.7B conus cordia --> conus cordis p232 Fig. 11.22A lower portion of the blue arrow should be anteior to that of red one. p281 Fig. 13.14B arrow pointing duodenum should be moved little upward p283 2nd line left --> right p345 5th line from the bottom 42 weeks --> 4 1/2 weeks p351 Fig15.6 legend mesoderm --> mesenchyme p375 17th line from the bottom .. oral cavity but after its rupture the primitive nasal chambers open into the oral cavity by way .. p387 Fig. 16.5C outer hair cell --> outer phalangeal cell inner hair cell --> inner phalangeal cell p427 Fig.19.18A Abducens nerve --> Trochlear nerve p429 Fig.19.20B medial aperture --> median aperture p455 Box lowest line vasculature --> musculature

Kyeong Han Park MD & PhD

Assistant Professor, Department of Anatomy, Seoul National University Medical College

insitu@snu.ac.kr

It's quite a GOOD book, i own it and i always find what i'm looking for. It comes with a lot of illustrations and CLINICAL CORRELATIONS (a very positive aspect) this is a MUST HAVE reference book, it covers every aspect of the General embryology, and then the special embryology of each organ and system. Always with usefull medical references.-

I am professor of Histology and Embryology in Pernambuco/Brazil. Of all books of Embryology I know, this is the best of all.It covers the basic subject without forget the molecular explanations. Simply the best one.

As soon as my wife got pregnant, the deluge of books started coming in for her. I was shocked at the huggy-feel-good nurture your baby books. All of them have the tone of how to have a baby for dummies. I wanted some real science, unfiltered and without the emotional crap. In my research for a book that would tell me the details of human development I happened on this book.

I really liked this book.

As a layman it was a good place for me to go back and review all the biology that I learned many years ago. It was also good to know what all the measurements, blood tests, and various poking and prodding all meant. Having some of a science background it was a good overview of the whole process. Knowing the various complications at different parts of the pregnancy was also good to know.

If you're squeamish about looking at dead babies with a variety of birth defects you should probably not read this book.

This is probably the worst science textbook I've ever used. An avalanche of facts are presented with little or no connection or motivation. I have spent hours trying to decipher a single page, and the figures are often confusing instead of clarifying. On top of it all, the English writing is terrible (the book starts with a sentence fragment: "From a single cell to a baby in 9 months."), and is replete with errors.

One gets the sense that someone has condensed a much longer book into the current version, leaving out the parts that connect and make sense of the minutiae. If you have a choice, use Carlson's Human Embryology and Developmental Biology or Moore & Persaud.