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Medicine – preclinical

PRECLINICAL MEDICINE

This section contains some of my notes to prepare for exams of the Cambridge Medical Course (graduate programme). The content is NOT supposed to be comprehensive, it mostly covers areas that I found more difficult or was not happy with the resources, so had to come up with a more elaborate set of notes.

The notes are derived from many different resources, such as standard textbooks, Wikipedia articles, lecture, tutorial/superivision notes and my brain. I can’t take responsibility for any errors but hopefully there aren’t many. If you find one, please get in touch, so I can improve the content presented here (CRfourtwosix(AT)cam.ac.uk))!!!

1st-year wisdom.

Here are some useful links and book recommendations:

* Firstly, a general piece of advice that has become my major strategy: When starting with any subject, make sure you get a brief book first to give you an initial idea, then read the handout, and then get a more detailed book to expand on any subjects of interest. There just isn’t enough time to read the big textbooks on every single topic.

* When learning anatomy, you should not miss this website: http://www.instantanatomy.net/. There is also a corresponding book, which is great, but you will probably appreciate more towards the end of the year.

* Translating unfamiliar anatomical terms into English using this website has helped me a great deal: http://www.anatomy.usyd.edu.au/glossary/

* An amazing anatomy website with great videos showing dissections and much more: http://www.med.umich.edu/lrc/coursepages/m1/anatomy2010/html/index-2.html

* Also very useful for exploring anatomy: http://bodybrowser.googlelabs.com/

* As an anatomy atlas, I found Rowen to be the best one. There are also Rowen dissection flashcards which I found very useful.

* As an anatomy text book, I used the big Gray’s Anatomy. I found that it was the only one to have sufficient detail. It has great pictures, which you can combine with the text of the anatomy handout to make sense of it. In fact, most black-and-white pictures of the handout had an exact colour equivalent in the big Gray’s, which was much more comprehensive.

* This is a 22-piece skull that I used for learning head-anatomy. I found it VERY useful, even though it is quite expensive. Perhaps you can get your college library to buy it.

* I found the Illustrated Colour Text a good embryology textbook, not too detailed.

* Larson’s Embryology is very (perhaps too) detailed, but has great movies/animations on Student Consult.

* I also enjoyed Levick’s Introduction to Cardiovascular Physiology. I even kept using this in the 2nd year.

2nd-year wisdom.

The second year requires more advice than a few book recommendations, which you can find in the individual subject sections. Take a look at the presentation below in which I’ve tried to summarise my impressions and ideas about the 2nd year:


 

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