Guide to the Dissection of the Dog: Evans & Delahunta
One of the more fun aspects of vet school is building up a library for when you enter the real world and practise. It’s a costly enterprise, but terribly entertaining.
For current vet students and those preparing to start, I thought I would start reviewing the textbooks I use to study. If you use any of these books yourself, by all means chime in with your thoughts!
Guide to the Dissection of the Dog
Howard Evans & Alexander Delahunta
My University issues a list of book ‘recommendations’ to incoming students as part of their Welcome Packet. Completely unaware of the other options available, most vet students buy off the list and show up to class with the same set of textbooks as everyone else. However, inevitably, as the year progresses other texts start to pop up as people learn from previous years and professors of other recommendations that may better suit them.
Evans & deLahunta’s Guide to the Dissection of the Dog is a very popular source for many vet students, but in my experience it falls short of being the ‘perfect’ study tool. The illustrations are thorough, the text is generally very descriptive, and the size is nice for walking around dissection lab - mine is so covered in odd-coloured stains that it has certainly been around the lab - but for revision purposes, it hardly compares to the full-colour photographic atlases. The most popular with my class for dog are Done’s Color Atlas Of Veterinary Anatomy: Volume 3, The Dog And Cat or Boyd’s Colour Atlas of Clinical Anatomy of the Dog and Cat, both of which rely heavily on pictures of dissected specimens, and in the case of the latter, radiographs.
Anatomy is older than photographs, and centuries of doctors and veterinarians seem to have survived on sketches to study the animal body, but photographs are better. They allow you to apprecate the depth and organisation of the anatomy. That’s not to say Evans & deLahunta’s text is not useful, but it needs to be supplemented.
One other argument in its favour: it’s (comparatively) dead cheap. At £38 it’s a better deal than the other aforementioned options, which run for £70 and £51 respectively at Amazon. But as my friends and I like to say, for a course that’s £20,000 a year in tuition, what’s £100 in books that will help you pass?