Abstract
This recent addition to the plethora of self-assessment texts now available focuses on emergency and critical care medicine, a field which is rapidly and justifiably becoming recognised as a discipline in its own right.
As Dr Kirby states in the preface, ‘you have to know it all in emergency and critical care medicine…’ and this book covers a commendably broad range of relevant subjects ranging from cardiology to reproduction via orthopaedics, neurology, feline medicine, anaesthesia, urology and fluid therapy to name but a few. For the reader interested in a particular discipline, questions pertaining to each broad subject area are classified at the start of the book.
The questions themselves consist largely of case-based scenarios, but some are aimed at discussion of general principles relating to diagnosis and therapy of a particular disorder. Answers to each question are helpfully displayed on the following page, and in the vast majority of are extensive, providing a mini-review of the topic in question and thereby imparting a massive quantity of both practical and theoretical information for what is meant to be a self-assessment text.
Criticisms are few and minor but probably inevitable in any multi-author text; some of the radiographs and electrocardiogram traces are not well reproduced, some drugs or drug names will be unfamiliar to European readers and the conversion of units from American to European is not consistent throughout all the questions. None of these points, however, detracts from the book's considerable usefulness as a source of self-testing, reference and clinical discussion and a copy should be found on the shelf of any student, nurse or clinician involved in emergency medicine and intensive care.