Langman's Medical Embryology with Simbryo CD-ROM, Ninth Edition by Thomas Sadler

Product Description

..recognized as the classic textbook in embryology, the new edition continues the long-standing tradition of clarity, brevity, & clinical relevance, making it even more appropriate for ever-shorter course hours in embryology
Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #307275 in Books
Published on: 2003-03-26
Number of items: 1
Binding: Paperback
534 pages
Editorial Reviews

Book Info
Birth Defects Prevention, Madison County, MT. Textbook provides a concise and comprehensive description of embryology and its clinical significance necessary for diagnosis and prevention of birth defects. New information is featured in molecular biology and includes more than 400 illustrations. Previous edition: c2000. Softcover. DNLM: Embryology.
Customer Reviews

Doesn't do a good job
Embryology is a subject of change; from the egg and sperm, to the blastocyst, to the embryo, to the fetus. Learning embryo can be difficult, and Langman's certainly didn't help with the understanding. One of my major complaints is the lack of diagrams that outline processes.

impossible to learn from
This is probably the worst science textbook I've ever used. An avalanche of facts are presented with little or no connection or motivation. I have spent hours trying to decipher a single page, and the figures are often confusing instead of clarifying. On top of it all, the English writing is terrible (the book starts with a sentence fragment: "From a single cell to a baby in 9 months."), and is replete with errors.

One gets the sense that someone has condensed a much longer book into the current version, leaving out the parts that connect and make sense of the minutiae. If you have a choice, use Carlson's Human Embryology and Developmental Biology or Moore & Persaud.

Almost there after only 10 editions!
So this is my book for my medical embryology course that I am taking right now, and I am extremely happy that I had an undergrad developmental biology course! It would be a pretty good book (3-4 stars) if it didn't contain an average of 4 mistakes per chapter (seriously). For example, in chapter 3, the secondary follicle is (wrongly) called a preantral follicle in a figure caption. In the text, the primary follicle is called a preantral follicle (which is correct). If you didn't know already, this book would just confuse you. In chapter 5, figure 5-4 will confuse you because figure 5-4b and 5-4c are reversed, both in the figure and in the caption. The effect of this error is a major one, leading you to believe that notochord development happens in a caudal to cranial direction when in fact it occurs in a cranial to caudal direction. In the text, it is stated correctly. Once again, if you don't know any better, you are just going to get confused by this book. Somatic and splanchnic mesoderm are confused by the author, and elementary mistake. Also, the editors must have been overly concerned with keeping the book small because the glossary of key terms doesn't even have definitions for primordial, primary, and secondary follicles, mesentery, peritoneum. That is horrible for an embryology book and ends up costing you more time looking up definitions that aren't there. The dictionary should be abandoned. Also, even bolded words such as alpha-fetoprotein are left out of the INDEX. Piss-poor for a book in its tenth edition, and the sad thing is, this is supposed to be the best medical embryology text out there. . . .

Aside from the obvious lack of effort in editing, this book has several good things about it. Despite being a tiny book, there is a lot of information packed into very dense writing. Some parts do not flow very linearly, which can be confusing. Other areas of embryogenesis are written poorly (e.g. progression of the villi from primary to tertiary, changes in fetal/maternal blood circulation), but you can still manage to get the idea if you spend a little extra time on it. After slowly reading through, and barring any crazy typos, you will have a pretty clear albeit abbreviated picture of medical embryology. Also, The emphasis on clinical correlations is very nice and well written. There are many good figures for the clinical correlations (it is the other figures that are iffy, as described above). The CD that comes with the book is very nice too and is the only thing that makes me give this book 2 stars instead of one for all of the mistakes in the text. It is cartoonish, but it animates VERY clearly what is going on during different embryonic periods of development.

All in all, I suspect you'll have to get this book if it is required. Just remember to be cautious of errors, especially in the figures. Maybe by the 11th edition all the kinks will finally get worked out. I doubt it.