“If you buy Medical Physiology as a first-year medical student, and keep up with the updates, it will serve you for life, giving you an understanding of the physiological processes behind the medical problems that you are trying to solve with your patients.” – Dr. Walter Boron
A teacher I had in high school was responsible for my choosing physiology. When I was a sophomore, we had a science fair. In preparation for the science fair, my teacher gave us different Scientific American articles to read. She gave me an article by John Eccles on transmission across the synapse, which for the next three years, I turned into a biology science fair project. Ever since then, since I was 15 years old, I was sucked into physiology. When I went to medical school and was planning on getting a PhD as part of the medical scientist training program, I knew it was going to be in physiology. It all stems back from high school.
I think physiology is a wonderful subject, which I think you have to immerse yourself in it. When I was in medical school, physiology was my most difficult subject because it’s not something that you can memorize, you have to conceptualize it. I think new trends like videos and animations that can help lead students through the thinking process of physiology are terrific.
The book builds from molecular biology to the cell and then to the organ and finally to the whole organism. So, the book goes from molecule to person. Among the books on the market, Medical Physiology probably has that most complete coverage between the molecular and the whole body. I think we’re unique in that angle. If you buy Medical Physiology as a first-year medical student, and keep up with the updates, it will serve you for life, giving you an understanding of the physiological processes behind the medical problems that you are trying to solve with your patients.
Medical Physiology is multi-authored, so experts in their field have written parts of it. Meanwhile, my co-author, Emile Boulpaep, and I have gone through the entire textbook word by word. It’s our intention that the book feels like it’s written by one pen. We also took quite a bit of effort to make sure that the style of the language, the words, symbols in the text, and symbols in the illustrations are all consistent in each chapter. We try to have consistency so that it comes across like everything is written by one author.
Walter F. Boron, MD serves as the David N. and Inez Myers/Antonio Scarpa Professor and Chairman of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at Case Western Reserve University. He has a strong background in cellular and molecular physiology and a special interest in the respiratory system. He worked at Yale University for 29 years, and served for a portion of that time as Chairman of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology. He is an author of Medical Physiology.
Dr. Boron’s honors include the Robert F. Pitts Award from the International Union of Physiological Sciences, Homer Smith Award from the American Society of Nephrology, and the Sharpey-Schafer Award from the Physiological Society. He is a former President of the American Physiological Society, and editor of Physiological Reviews.
Related Author: Emile L. Boulpaep, MD
