Customer Reviews

Potter's Pathology of the Fetus, Infant and Child: 2-Volume Set with CD-ROM, 2e

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

 

 

If you are a pediatric pathology fellow or practicing pediatric pathologist, this book is a must-have. If you are a general practising pathologist, this book is an excellent reference to supplement your Rosai or Sternberg.

Some of the features I like best:

1. The details are just right. It has more details than Dr. Barness's earlier book Pathology of Embryo and Infants, which by the way is a baby Potter so to speak. Yet it does not overwhelm you with details that you don't need, generally speaking.

2. Super organization with many tables and algorithms make very complicated subjects quite approachable and easily intelligible. I must add - the masterful use of tables is perhaps the best feature of the book, rendering the most complicated and well, or less well-studied subjects to the level of text-book easiness. As a motivated reader myself, I don't think any other approach would be better to be both comprehensive and concise in communicating the information accumulated by so many observations and studies. For people ever take up any in-depth studies on any subjects, Dr. Barness's approach is highly instructive. It is no wonder she was able of writing on so many subjects so skillfully while many of us can only focus on one or two much smaller subjects. Her (and her some of her coauthors') super ability to analyze and summarize.

3. Some texts are bolded to help readers with most important and practical points; this is important because some major points may not be obvious to a person without enough prior knowledge or experience with the subject. It helps exams as well.

4. It is well-illustrated, although I don't mind if future editions have even more pages of illustrations, because many entities still do not have single image to fix readers' imagination. Of course this will make the book more bulky, but considering using thinner paper might be a solution as that was done for many other important reference books.

5. Carefully chosen references also bespeak the book's excellence, and they are extremely well-organized under single entities or subjects instead of into a big aggregate; often times they tell histories of our understanding of the diseases. To a diligent reader, the references pages themselves deserve some good amount of attention. For many entities, I read these references line by line.

Some of chapters are less well written than some others, which is unavoidable in a multiauthor book, is evident. Some entities seen in pediatric pathology practice though not mostly considered as pediatric lesion are occasionally left out.

By the way, most people take pediatric pathology board read this book and most of them pass if they are dilligent enough. If you must choose a single book for pediatric pathology board, this is the book to go.

If you perform pediatric autopsies at your facility, this book should be in the department's library. It is very dependable and perhaps the best reference book and most complete source of pediatric pathology that I have encountered.