Cardiac Surgery Clerkship: A Guide For Senior Medical Students

This quick-reference guide is the first book written specifically for the many third- and fourth-year medical students rotating on the cardiac surgery service. The book focuses on the diagnosis and management of the most common pathologic entities. Each chapter covers history, physical examination, imaging, and common diagnoses. For each diagnosis, the book sets out the typical presentation, options for non-operative and operative management, and expected outcomes. Chapters include key illustrations, quick-reference charts, tables, diagrams, and bulleted lists. Students can read the text from cover to cover to gain a general foundation of knowledge that can be built upon when they begin their rotation, then use specific chapters to review a sub-specialty before starting a new rotation or seeing a patient with a sub-specialty attending. Topics covered include bypass, valve repair and replacement, heart and lung transplantation, congenital heart defects, aortic trauma, and much more.

Practical and user-friendly, Cardiac Surgery Clerkship is the ideal, on-the-spot resource for medical students and practitioners seeking fast facts on diagnosis and management. Its bullet-pointed outline format makes it a perfect quick reference, and its content breadth covers the most commonly encountered problems in clinical practice.

Jordan Bloom, MD, MPH is an Assistant Professor of Surgery at Harvard medical and a cardiac surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital.  Dr. Bloom performs the full spectrum of adult cardiac surgery including coronary bypass, valvular repair/replacements and aortic surgery and specializes in the care of adults with congenital heart disease (ACHD). His practice is broad and covers a variety of congenital disorders including connective tissue diseases and bicuspid aortic valve aortopathy. He has a strong clinical and research interest in the Ross procedure for patients with aortic stenosis or regurgitation and has done extensive multi-institutional training on this procedure. 

After completing his general and cardiothoracic surgical training at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Bloom traveled to the Royal Brompton Hospital in London where he completed a trust fellowship under the mentorship of Professor Darryl Shore. The Brompton is a hospital dedicated only to patients with heart and lung disease and has one of the largest divisions solely dedicated to the care of ACHD patients. 

During his surgical training, Dr. Bloom earned a master’s degree from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and devotes his academic time to research in quality improvement, education, and outcomes in cardiac surgery.

Thoralf M. Sundt, MD, is the Churchill Professor of Surgery, Harvard Medical School and Chief of the Division of Cardiac Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, co-director of the Corrigan Minehan Heart Center at MGH, and the Director of the Cardiac Surgery Clinical Service for Mass General Brigham.  He attended Medical School at Johns Hopkins and trained in General Surgery at eth MGH before taking Cardiothoracic training at Washington University in St. Louis.  After 15 months in the National Health Service at Harefield Hospital in the UK, he has served on the faculty of the Departments of Surgery at Washington University School of Medicine and Mayo Clinic prior to returning to MGH.  He is Past President of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery. His clinical focus is surgery of acquired cardiovascular conditions in adults.  He is committed to advancing the understanding of cardiac surgical care among all caregivers, and supporting interest in career choices in this exciting and rapidly evolving field.