Manter and Gatz's Essentials of Clinical Neuroanatomy and Neurophysiology

Rating:
Summary: Neuroanatomy for the masses
Review: ...The present edition (reviewed here) is BETTER than the book that saved our collective butt back in the days before Mangled Care, and I would recommend it not only to medical students and the FMGs striving to break into the bleak present practice environment but also to medical writers in need of an inexpensive, reliable, and accessible source of information on this extremely important subject...*Manter and Gatz* provides that much and more.

Rating:
Summary: Neuroanatomy for the masses
Review: In many US medical schools, the didactic years are marked by an institution known as the Note Pool. Inasmuch as the prevailing motto is "Cooperate and Graduate," classes of medical students will join forces to systematically attack the task of assimilating the vast amount of factual information under which they're routinely buried. Because almost all lectures are taken in common (i.e., the first two years of med school jam everybody into the same classroom), it's possible for everyone to make use of the same notes.

Enter the Note Pool. Like the doctors they'll become, medical students approach their work with different aptitudes, interests, and educational backgrounds -- and they *specialize*. If there are five lectures in biochemistry every week, the average class of med students is bound to have at least five members with a background (often at postgraduate level) in biochemistry, and there will be a volunteer for each lecture who will accept responsibility for concentrating attention on a particular day's presentation, bashing the material into cogency, and submitting it for photocopying and distribution to the entire class.

Back in the days when we ran off our notes on a mimeograph machine, I was a sort of "utility infielder" for our Note Pool, filling in when people couldn't make it to class, handling the extra lectures that got shuffled into our schedules, and generally shouldering the extra work that came along. (Needless to say, I became a general practitioner.) Neuroanatomy was one of those one-trimester courses that "came along." I got stuck with both of the weekly lectures, and that leads us to a discussion of *Manter and Gatz's Essentials of Clinical Neuroanatomy and Neurophysiology*.

Bearing a double burden of lectures to cover (while also running the Note Pool's mimeograph machine), I had desperate need of a "cheat sheet" to help me get at the essentials of this subject, and I found it in a much earlier edition of this book. Lucid, economically written, and perpetually on-point, *Manter and Gatz* enabled me not only to educate myself in the essentials of human neuroanatomy but also to put the material in order for the rest of my med school class. The present edition (reviewed here) is BETTER than the book that saved our collective butt back in the days before Mangled Care, and I would recommend it not only to medical students and the FMGs striving to break into the bleak present practice environment but also to medical writers in need of an inexpensive, reliable, and accessible source of information on this extremely important subject.

As the present electoral hoo-haw amply demonstrates, the vast majority of the population certainly doesn't make any effective *USE* of what they're carrying between their ears. This notwithstanding, the silly boogers do have central nervous systems, and it behooves those of us responsible for the medical care of these damned fools to know how those neurons and their supporting structures are organized. *Manter and Gatz* provides that much and more.