Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple: Buy This Book? No, Get It From The Library

I taught medical school students for six years in Chicago, and they often asked me whether they should buy Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple. My answer was three-fold; compare it to their required textbook, note the differences, and use Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple only as an ancillary text. I gave them the same advice when the wanted to know if they should use it to study for the Boards, except to stress that the book had almost no immunology. My recommendations usually sailed out the window.

What do I think about this book? For some topics, meaning basic microbiology, especially about bacteria and protozoa, it's fine. It also has some usefulness for viruses, and probably (of the material that is in the book) the least for fungi. Those are the areas of microbiology that lend themselves best to memorization of basic facts, and that's what this book emphasizes. There's plenty in there to memorize; so much that you may well think you understand more than you do when you've finished with the book. However, even for basic material, the information on fungi is scanty.

The major groups of bacteria, and the diseases they cause, are well represented for a relatively brief text. Some of the information is organized into large tables to aid the reader in organizing it mentally, and to memorize it. Even so, the emphasis on memorization is so heavy that at times concepts and understanding are sacrificed. For example, after studying this book, some students will still not really understand what bi-polar staining is (bacterial cells that stain at either end but not in the middle), what the difference is between an enterotoxin and an endotoxin (one affects the intestinal tract, one is part of the bacterial cell wall), or what pyogenic (pus forming) vs. pyrogenic (fever inducing) is.

I could give other examples without picking nits. I cannot begin to emphasize how important it is to give students understanding at the very beginning, besides memorization, and this text goes too far towards memorization. Still, that's okay for information about bacteria and fungi (and protozoa), but less so for the viruses, and not very good at all for immunology (which isn't in the book except for a few scattered bits).

Virology can be very confusing, and difficult to memorize if you don't understand how viral genetic material replicates, depending on whether it's RNA or DNA, single or double-stranded, linear or circular, segmented or whole, etc. Again, that's not in the text, and that's a critical omission. The biggest shortcoming with the text is the near total lack of immunology. While you don't need a whole immunology course to understand the rest of microbiology, you must have some understanding of it. You won't get it here. Knowing immunology is critical for understanding how certain kinds of infectious diseases infect and spread, most notably AIDS. It also helps explain how a lot of laboratory tests in microbiology work.

Other comments? There are no self-test questions (remember, you'll need these to test yourself to see if you understand things). There are also no high-quality photographs or drawings. You do get quite a few low-quality drawings meant to be humorous, but they mostly look dumb. (The author likes to draw naked people.) Otherwise, the drawings tend to emphasize the most obvious points instead of the more complicated ones.

Like I said at the beginning, Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple is at best an ancillary text for a basic microbiology course, and not the primary or sole reference to prepare for the boards. Take you instructor's advice first.