Customer Reviews

The Washington Manual of Surgical Pathology: Department of Pathology and Immunology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO ... (Formerly known as the Spiral Manual Series))

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

 

 

I liked this book very much. It is small in size but has a great fund of UPDATED knowledge. It doesn't have pictures or images in its printed format because I think the authors want to make the size of the book small to be handy and not heavy :-). It fits into the pocket of your lab coat. They put all the images in an electronic image bank. I liked the text part of the book as it is very comprehensive and contains the information I need on the sign out and when I want to check for some information quickly. It is really a great book for pathologists.

Get this.....especially if you are studying for boards (either USMLE or path boards). A great tool to have at the scope side. Make sure you register for the web site...the image bank alone is worth the price and the entire text is available online.

This is a great book for quick reference, if u want to quickly look up staging, grading, types of diseases, histologic features, gross features, etc. It is very well organized, and a great study guide sort of like Outlines in Pathology by Sinard, but up to date and considerably more detailed. It has a little bit of cytology at the end of each chapter. Its great for any resident who is pressed for time and needs a quick diagnosis and histopathology description. It also has a little bit about grossing and processing techniques relevant to each chapter. Full text online access makes it even more accessible if u don't want to carry it around. Also, it has a huge image bank, which is great, although the resolution of the pictures when u zoom in is not so hot. Would definately recommend without hesitation.

This is a very handy book to have on hand as you're reviewing slides, and trying to come up with a complete and useful diagnosis. It gives all the pertinent information you need to get the job done including diagnostic features, staging and grading. As it fits in your pocket, it's a nice quick reference to have as you're signing out, and is much more useful than baby Robbins.

I am so excited about this little book. I wish I had owned it when I was struggling with surg path rotations as a lower level resident and especially studying for boards. It is very comprehensive in general. I have only a few issues with it, and that is why I had to take away a star:

Because the chapters are written by different people, the writing style, amount/size/type of pictures and content varies by chapter. Most are fine. But as another reviewer said, the resolution on the pictures isn't great. However, since you have to use the internet to look at the pictures, if you need a better picture you can just go to google images or a pathology website.

I love the staging information and other tables, plus the fact that the book is small and portable. I take it with me to tumor conferences and do supplemental reading during the conference as a great way to reinforce learning. Actually you don't even need the book all the time, you can read it online.

I don't remember finding many errors of content or typos either, which drives me crazy.

At the price, you can't beat this little book.

I am a 4th year medical student who is starting a pathology residency in July.

I picked up this book right before my 4th year to help me with my pathology clerkships. This book is small enough to fit in my white coat pocket, but detailed enough to cover every disease that was mentioned during my 4 week clerkship. How do they manage that? There are no pictures in this book; they are provided online with purchase of the book.

I have heard from residents who have taken the boards that you can pass by knowing everything in this book. Obviously I can't vouch for that yet, but that seems like a great endorsement of the amount of information contained in this 60 dollar book.

One note of caution if you plan to buy this soon... a new edition will be out in March 2012!

Covers most things in surgical pathology. Especially good for PGY1/2s. Definitely not all-encompassing, but fits in your pocket. If you know everything in this book, you probably know enough to pass AP boards.

I give this book a buy rating.

This book is a useful but concise resource for residents. If you buy this in addition to "The Practice of Surgical Pathology: A Beginner's Guide to the Diagnostic Process" by Diana Weedman Molavi, you'll be set for the start of your pathology residency.

Both of these are very useful books for beginners, covering key concepts and practical points in a very short and concise but useful manner. These will help you survive that first sign out and help bridge that gap when you're just starting out and find even Robbins overwhelming, not to mention Sternberg or Rosai.

All of the images in The Washintong manual are available in color online once you buy the book, the online content includes all text and several e-figures in the image bank. Many of the newer texts and new editions of older texts now have this feature, which I find very important when buying a book. This helps keep the book physically small and easy to carry around for those impromptu study sessions. Some may see this as a negative point - the absence of any actual color images in the book, I mean - but I don't think this is intended as an in depth reference text, and from this point of view serves it's target market very well.

This book is great but it is not for junior residents looking for a summary before reading the necessary background, it is complex in areas and presents post grad info in a manual forma with many table to refresh you in a quick reading moment.All in all a good book to have on your desk

As a scope-side reference, the Washington Manual is extremely helpful. Use it to remind yourself of the key features of an entity, or to develop a differential diagnosis. The text is well-written and the authors are all authorities in their field, except for a few residents who have crept in (sometimes as sole chapter authors).

There are some downsides. The book was published before the 7th edition AJCC cancer staging guidelines were adopted, so some staging information is now out of date (endometrium, for example). The text states in at least one place that the online version will be updated to reflect 7th ed AJCC when it comes out. Since that occurred in 2010 (and it's now 2011), I asked Lippincott about this and they told me explicitly: Uh, no, we decided not to do that. Sorry.

The major shortcoming, though, is the online image bank. Other reviewers have praised it, but accessing it requires several steps and navigating through it is clunky. The Flash applet for the image bank does not behave quite the way your web browser does, so it's frustrating to navigate around. It's impossible to view captions and images at the same time. The resolution of the images is too low for diagnostic use and the "zoom" feature just gives a pixelated digital zoom effect. Lippincott recently revamped their e-book platform and made the e-text exactly resemble the book pages, but bafflingly, the images are still not hyperlinked to the text. Under the right circumstances, these figures would actually be pretty good, so it's too bad that Lippincott made such poor use of them.

The authors could have made the book even more useful by focusing on "line diagnoses": now that you've decided what you have on your slide, how should you phrase your diagnosis? But this obviously will be a matter of local practice. Finally, I would personally venture to say that putting figures online only is an experiment that has failed. Lippincott, no one is actually trying to put this "pocket manual" in their pocket. So give the pathologist a little respect, kick the price and size of the book up a couple of notches and print the darn pictures with the text.