Recommended Literature

(Diese Seite ist nur in Englisch verfügbar.)

This page...

...lists some of the medical books which are, in my humble opinion, of extraordinarily high quality.

In the future, I may extend this page to other categories. Please navigate along the headlines.

B. Bates, M. Berger, I. Mühlhauser: Klinische Untersuchung des Patienten.

Barbara Bates: A Guide to Physical Examination and History Taking.

An excellent book which gives you essential information on topics which - regrettably - I have found to be completely absent in students even immediately after completion of the clinical examination course. Additionally, this book introduces strategies for problem solving as well as guidelines for effective documentation.

Thinking of the kind of patient file which I found in my German teaching hospitals and of my own education, I notice that comparable strategies were never touched within the official curriculum.

So maybe, some hospital administrations might wish to buy this book and give it away to all of their physicians for free. It might finally save some technical diagnostic procedures... In the University setting, it might give a nice complement to the macroscopic anatomic course as well as a fine base for the course on physical examination.

Lucy Frank Squire, M.D. / Robert A. Novelline, M.D.: Radiologie. Deutsche Bearbeitung: A. Heuck.

Lucy Frank Squire, M.D. / Robert A. Novelline, M.D.: Fundamentals of Radiology.

This is a very nice book which teaches you how to look at a chest X-ray. It also teaches you, why to do it this way. And how it all works. And even if you're not interested in technical details: it keeps you reading and understanding.

A more recent edition has become available in a study edition: same quality, different colour, lower price.

Frank H. Netter, M.D.: The CIBA collection of medical illustrations.

This work includes brilliant artwork illustrating anatomic knowledge, normal physiology, pathophysiology, histology and typical clinical pictures of a variety of diseases. It is quite old, so some of the methods discussed have been developed far beyond what is described. However, it contains a wide base of still up-to-date knowledge, and with respect to its didactic quality, it is an invaluable ressource.

Some volumes are available as German translations, but I don't like those as much as the original version.

W. Kaufmann: Internistische Differentialdiagnostik. Entscheidungsprozesse in Flußdiagrammen.

An advanced book which offers diagnostic trees or flowcharts for differential diagnosis. I think that some of these flowcharts would require a bit of further work, because sometimes diagnostic procedures and their results are mixed a bit arbitrarily, and also the text seems somewhat lengthy. But definitely, this book can provide an overview over a wide range of possible diagnoses if you have identified a leading symptom, and it shows clearly the paths you have to follow to rule some out and others in.

Besides an educational effect on problem solving strategies and clinically reasonable thinking, the use of this book might lead to less missed differential diagnoses - which always should have been kept in mind, but may be forgotten (i.e.: porphyria.).

I wonder when somebody will start converting this book into a clinical diagnosis support system or into a comfortable hypertext version. Might even be done with links to current literature as best evidence... By the way: the AnyQuest questionnaire-file example for differential diagnosis of jaundice, which is available here, substantially relies on information from this book.

Gerd Herold und Mitarbeiter: Innere Medizin - Eine vorlesungsorientierte Darstellung.

A standard students' and physicians' ressource. Very brief, somehow comprehensive, though. Updated every year, although the 1995 version is just lying in front of me, you will probably find a more current one in the hands of every other colleague. The preceeding edition may be quite worn out physically, when you decide to update...

At the University of Ulm, you may ask the Fachschaft "Bunte Spritze", whether they can offer you a copy at a bulk rate.

Pschyrembel: Klinisches Wörterbuch.

Another standard students' and physicians' ressource. Updated very often and available on CD-ROM, in the meantime.

Thieme Datenbank DIAGNOSIS.

After entering symptoms, findings or other keywords, this database delivers a list of several possible diagnosis. Says its title screen. Well, it actually delivers a collection of abstracts, either excerpts from textbooks or real life cases. They are very useful to get a quick overview about a variety of diagnoses and stratagies. And they can provide challenging material for students' diagnostic learning and discussion rounds: One can use the database and have the others work their way through a scenario.

My version is no new stuff. Was distributed together with a practice management software package back in 1988... It would be oh so nice, if somewhere in the future, the University hospitals would discover the potential benefit from tools like this one.