Ganong's Review of Medical Physiology

"Ganong’s Review of Medical Physiology was recommended by my professors in Egypt, who taught me in the first year at medical school. We had one particular professor, Hani Ayoub, who was known for his love of understanding mechanisms, and he recommended this book. He used to refer to it in his lectures. It was very interesting but one of the most difficult books I have read. It keeps you really thinking hard about understanding and interpreting the knowledge. It ignites curiosity to go and read further. It certainly doesn’t—or at least it didn’t at the time when I read it—give you all the detail. When I started this book I remember, for example, reading how electric impulses are transmitted within the heart and how these then get translated into an ECG recording; how the two marry up. Trying to understand the basis of that in depth was fascinating for me: how that impulse would be transmitted, the so-called action potential, by changes in the concentration of sodium and potassium across the membrane of a cell, and how that generated what looks like an electric impulse. That was just amazing and fascinating to study. As you go through the book, you read how the retina functions in our eyes. We have photons that we accumulate through the lens of the eye and this then gets transmitted to the retina that has the sensors that can then transmit that to the brain, and give an image of whatever you are seeing. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I remember the conversations I had about that particular mechanism. I wanted to understand how the receptor picks up that image and changes it into an electric impulse. At the time, that wasn’t very clear. My professor said, ‘Ahmed, what you are asking is not what we teach medical students. What you’re asking about is research. If you want to understand that in depth, then you need to go to a lab and do research.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I do need that. That is exactly what I want.’ That really started from reading Ganong and that in-depth thinking. Yes, I just gave you the examples that stuck in my mind, and that moved me. It was not the ovary and how the ovary functioned at the time. It was the retina. I think so. But Ganong is one of the tough ones. Perhaps not all students would be fond of Ganong. It gives you a flavour, an introduction, and then you need to go and think, if you want to. Yes, it certainly played a big role in shaping my interests from the first year of medical school."