Current Surgical Therapy

Have been reading Cameron since I was a mid level resident. Great for concise up to date clinical management of surgical diseases. Read Schwartz or Sabiston if you need more in depth basic science. Pair with an operative atlas and it's great through residency and throughout your career.

Cameron is an age-old classic text with a shoo-in audience: surgeons, duh. As a mature academic surgeon taking licensing exams, I can definitely say there are parts that are slip-shod. Some chapters -- especially those describing state-of-the-art innovations -- left me Googling for missing bits of the puzzle (e.g. heavy text describing the steps and anatomy of the pancreas transplant, and no post-operative picture??? Google). At times, the sequence of chapters left the reader puzzling (the chapter on radiotherapy for pancreas cancer was not immediately after chemotherapy of palliative care, it was somewhere between surgery for rare cancer and transplant?; the chapter on obstructive jaundice way far away from the one on obstructive CBD stones?). And then there was (were?) the chapter listing common surgical complications without nary a mention of how to manage them (yes, yes, we should "all know", but isn't that what a textbook is for?). Last but not least -- the appendix! If one chapter author says "as described elsewhere in this textbook", and the appendix only gives those pages for that same chapter saying "as described elsewhere in this textbook", then there is something seriously wrong with either the texbook or the appendix. So maybe this is still the best in-depth general surgery textbook out there for us -- but that is no excuse for not meeting the standards expected of a surgeon: we always strive to give the best that we can, not just for our generation, but for future generations. Imagine if an operation we conducted had the same problems as this textbook -- the illogical order, the expectation that something has been done by someone else in the same book, and the missing pictures. Last but not least -- I am married to a literary book editor and completely understand that typos are so easy to miss -- and there are many -- but subject-level and "big-picture" errors should not happen just because you have a certain bestseller. If we wanted to use Google as a textbook, we needn't have bought this book.

Want to do better on absite and in general surgery residency? Highly recommend this book. You can thank me later.

Quick delivery, and the textbook looks like it is brand new. Only thing that did not match the description was that the access code for the e-book (which was not scratched off when I received the book) did not work.