Concise Textbook of Medicine

Textbooks serve medical education by closing the gaps in information gleaned from conferences, ward rounds, lecture courses, and medical journals. Usually the modern textbook can be contained in a single volume. However, the expansive and frequent changes in medical information have engendered colossal texts of several thousand pages. Cramming all of our knowledge of internal medicine into a single volume has become as difficult as stuffing all of the afflictions of the universe back into a mythological Pandora's box!

By way of obviating this situation, an array of medical textbooks has appeared with titles intended to modify our expectations of the books' contents. Concise Textbook of Medicine is a revision and presumably a condensation of Kochar's earlier Textbook of General Medicine. The adjective concise purportedly defines the structure of the text so that we expect it to be shorter than standard. Other words that have been used to indicate shortened