This is an option for third year medical students who want a brief and readable review book in a prose rather than bullet point style. However it is by no means comprehensive and more in depth resources such as a surgery textbook should be utilized for presentations or for detailed investigation. It is suitable for the third year clerkship level.

Although Essentials of General Surgery has a place. It is just that "GENERAL". It has limited info about specifics related to procedures. See review titled MUSHY posted by another reviewer. "Essentials of Surgical Specialties" is much more detail oriented.

Lawrence's book tends to be controversial; some students sing its paens while others think its best use is in the recycle bin. I purchased this book with an interest in surgery and was overall disappointed. It does a decent job of covering all aspects of a surgical disease (pathophys, workup, treatment), but overall it's a mess. When I wanted a definitive answer, it felt like Lawrence would say do this, but some physicians do this, new research states this, etc. When you take a shelf exam, you can only give one answer. Lawrence made things hazy. This is how it work in the real world at times, but the real world also demands a strict answer. Next step is ____, next thing to order is ____.

The book is organized like most surgical texts; it starts off with nonsurgical chapters on fluids & electrolytes, nutrition, etc. While necessary, they're extremely boring and things start to sound the same (hypokalemia vs hypomag vs etc). First Aid and NMS tend to make better deliniations. After reading Lawrence, I still didn't have a good idea how to preop/postop a patient (each case is different, but there are some generalities or bread and butter cases), nor could I easily reference this book for quick answers.

I spent a lot of time wading through this book, but in the end I don't know if I learned much because everything became vague or nonmemorable. Each chapter has some multiple choice questions (weak) and a final Q&A oral review (good).

The surgery clerkship can be exhausting and time intensive. I wish I had spent my time with a different text. The surgery shelf exam smacked me a good one.

A better option would be to just memorize Surgical Recall thoroughly and do several question books or case scenarios (NMS Casebook). Surgeons for several years have been reading Recall. The Lawrence text I used was the second edition from around 2000, I believe, which is pretty old in medicine. Thank God they finally made a new one, but I doubt there's an overall improvement in the body of the text.

You might get more out of this book if you focus purely on it, take rigorous notes, review it again and again, etc. but it will be difficult to find time for this, and in the end, your thoughts on how to work up an upper GI bleed might just turn to mush.