About the Book
Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine: Self-Assessment and Board Review is a comprehensive question-and-answer resource designed to help medical students, residents, and physicians prepare for internal medicine board examinations, in-service exams, shelf exams, and continuing medical education. It is closely aligned with Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, one of the major reference texts in internal medicine.
The 20th edition contains more than 1,000 board-style clinical questions, predominantly presented as clinical vignettes with multiple-choice answers. Each question is followed by detailed explanations of both the correct and incorrect choices, helping readers develop clinical reasoning rather than simply memorize facts.
The material covers the major areas of internal medicine, including cardiology, pulmonology and critical care, infectious diseases, oncology and hematology, nephrology, gastroenterology, endocrinology, rheumatology, immunology, and neurology. Questions are organized according to the structure of Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine and the relative importance of topics on internal medicine examination blueprints.
Summary
The book is essentially a practical self-testing and clinical-reasoning companion to Harrison’s main textbook. Rather than presenting medicine as a continuous textbook narrative, it challenges the reader with realistic patient scenarios and asks them to determine the most appropriate diagnosis, investigation, interpretation, or treatment.
The questions cover a broad range of clinical situations. A typical case may describe a patient’s symptoms, medical history, physical examination, laboratory results, imaging findings, or other diagnostic information. The reader must analyze these clues, identify the most important clinical features, and select the best answer.
The explanations are particularly important because they go beyond simply stating which option is correct. They explain why the correct answer is appropriate and why the alternative answers are incorrect, reinforcing differential diagnosis, pathophysiology, epidemiology, diagnostic strategies, and therapeutic decision-making.
A major strength of the book is its emphasis on high-yield clinical knowledge. The questions are distributed across the principal disciplines of internal medicine and are intended to reflect the relative emphasis of board examinations. The 20th edition also includes numerous new questions and hundreds of illustrations, radiographs, and pathology images.
Overall, Harrison’s Self-Assessment and Board Review works best as an active-learning tool: readers answer questions, identify weaknesses, study the explanations, and then return to the relevant sections of Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine for deeper review. The current McGraw Hill online version has also evolved into Harrison’s Review Questions, with questions being added and updated regularly.
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Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, Self-Assessment and Board Review
