Which would you choose?

[Gr8Hands]

Long time lurker on this board, have really enjoyed reading posts over the years. Im finishing my General Surgery residency, will start my Plastic Surgery fellowship in July. I have $500 left in book money at my current program and am looking to use it to buy another Plastics Text. I Currently have in my Library:

1. Green's Operative Hand Surgery (2 volume set)
2. Mathes Plastic Surgery (2nd ed. 8 volume set)
3. The Art of Asthetic Surgery (Nahia, 3 volume set)
4. Sobotta Anatomy (14 ed. 2 volume set)
5. Grab & Smiths Plastic Surgery (6th edition)
6. Plastic Surgery Secrets
7. Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Board Review
8. Michigan Manual of Plastic Surgery

What text would you guys recommend if you had $500 to spend and already had the texts above?

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[BlondeDocteur]

I'm a med student, and I own #s 8, 6 and 5.

The Michigan Manual is definitely on "my" level. In fact it wasn't thorough or detailed enough to serve my purposes as a sub-i. Plastic Surgery Secrets was incredible, for me. All the plastics residents at my place use it too-- but it's not a comprehensive textbook, it's Secrets. Grabb & Smith's is for pre-reading at night (I've been working my way through it at night this year off).

The best resource I have is Selected Readings in Plastic Surgery. A kind person who had the entire thing (worth several thousand dollars) digitally archived made me a copy. It's several megabytes worth of space but excellent.

Hope that helps. Obviously the opinions of people more senior than I matter much more.

 

[maxheadroom]

Stay away from the Mathes Plastic Surgery set -- it's pretty useless. Green's Hand Surgery doesn't really tell you how to do operations. Instead, the books that I'd recommend:

Nahai Aesthetic 3 volume is good
Spear's Breast book (2 volumes) is excellent
Kevin Chung's Hand & Wrist Atlas is very good (also 2 volumes)
Instead of the Michigan Manual, I'd buy the UT Southwestern version
Guyuron's 2 Volume Plastic Surgery textbook is also quite good
Grabb's Flap Encyclopedia is very good

I like Selected Readings, but I think that it's a bit advanced for someone who doesn't have a fairly established knowledge base. I steer my junior residents away from it and tell them to start with Guyuron or Grabb & Smith first.

 

[Gr8Hands]

Thanks for the Recs!

 

[ClaudiaPipkens]

I would personally prefer these three:

Green's Operative Hand Surgery (2 volume set),
Plastic Surgery Secrets,
The Art of Asthetic Surgery (Nahia, 3 volume set)

 

[GSresident]

The Mathes and Nahai 2 volume reconstructive set is awesome. Ian Jackson's book on Local flaps for head and neck (something like that) is also a really really really good book. I'm using a flap from that book in about 15 minutes.

 

[JackieMoore]

Thank you very much for your advise, much appreciated.