Critical View · Free · 257 pages · 2026
Revise your general surgery board, wherever you sit it.
Critical View — General Surgery Board Review
The whole general surgery syllabus, chapter by chapter: the rules that carry marks set out in tables, the trials you should be able to name, and a hundred-question paper with the reasoning for every option. No charge, no account, and it is the same book whichever examination you are sitting — because general surgery does not change at the border.
What is inside
- Twenty chapters, one per area of the syllabus, weighted as an examination weights them — not as a subspecialty interest would.
- Three questions before each chapter, with no answers. Attempt them cold; the answers are at the end, deliberately out of eyeshot.
- A figure placing each chapter inside the paper, and a table of what its syllabus covers.
- The rules that carry marks, in a table — when you see this against what it means.
- The trials you should be able to name, with what each is about, and the guidance each chapter rests on.
- A hundred questions, mixed rather than grouped by chapter, with the reasoning for every option — not just the right one.
How it is built to be learned from
The structure is not decorative. It follows what the study of learning actually supports, which is mostly the opposite of how people revise.
- Answer before you read. Trying to retrieve something you do not yet know primes you to absorb it. Getting it wrong first is not wasted effort.
- Retrieve, do not reread. Testing yourself beats reviewing, by a wide margin. Rereading and highlighting feel productive and are among the weakest techniques measured.
- Space it out. Every chapter ends with the same instruction: come back in two days, then a week, then three weeks.
- Mix the topics. The paper is not grouped by chapter. Interleaving feels harder and retains better — and revising one subject at a time flatters you.
The book says all of this in its opening pages, with what to do about it, so the method is usable rather than just claimed.
Which examination is this for?
Any general surgery certifying or licensing examination outside the United States and the United Kingdom. The core of the specialty is the same everywhere; what changes is the weighting and the format, and the guide covers the core.
Exit examinations
- MHKICBSC — Hong Kong Inter-Collegiate Board of Surgical Colleges
- PBS — Philippine Board of Surgery / Philippine Society of General Surgeons
- Arab Board — Arab Board of Health Specializations
Sitting one that is not listed? The guide still covers your syllabus — those are the examinations whose published blueprints we have transcribed and can show you domain by domain.
The syllabus it covers
Who wrote it, and what it is not
Sole author: Pablo Lozano Lominchar, MD PhD EBPSM, consultant in General and Digestive Surgery at Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Marañón, Madrid, and Associate Professor of Surgery at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Every chapter, every rule and every answer was written and clinically reviewed by him.
This is educational material and nothing else. It exists to help a surgeon pass an examination. Examination questions compress a decision into one best answer; a patient does not. Nothing in it is clinical guidance, and nothing in it may be used to decide the care of a real person.
It is drawn from a bank of five thousand original questions. Every guideline version and named trial was resolved against PubMed and ClinicalTrials.gov before publication.
Not clinical guidance and never a basis for a decision about a real patient. Not affiliated with or endorsed by any examining body. No question reproduces an item from any past paper. See the medical disclaimer.