Junqueira's Basic Histology: Review

Pros

• Easy to understand - The biggest selling point of ‘Junqueira's Basic Histology’ is that it really understands and adheres to the meaning of ‘basic’. The author has managed to successfully find a perfect balance between excruciating details and relevant knowledge for health-science students - and trust us, that balance is a very fine art. Each chapter and section has the right length and amount of explanations to help you understand the topic.
• Multiple styles of labelled illustrations - Histology can be quite challenging to explain. Microscopy slides are essential, but they have limited capabilities when it comes to teaching, so you need to use sketches and purposefully drawn diagrams to explain many concepts and processes. Once again, ‘Junqueira's Basic Histology 14th Edition’ has aced this marriage. Offering you clearly drawn diagrams, HD displayed microscopy slides, proper labels and succinct figure legends, this textbook will ensure that you know your basement membrane from your stratified epithelium by the time your histology practical exam rolls around.

• ‘Medical application’ boxes and tables - Histology can be quite bland, so anything that can add a bit of taste to it is a welcome improvement. This textbook tackles this aspect by having boxes containing clinical information and small summary lists of various sections dotted throughout its pages. The clinically filled boxes apply the knowledge, while the tables provide you with an instant snapshot of certain sections or crucial histological information such as landmarks or comparisons. They’re a godsend for studying (and maintaining your sanity!).
• Summary sections - These are the bread and butter of any academic textbook, especially for subjects like anatomy and histology, and ‘Junqueira's Basic Histology 14th Edition’ cuts no corners. Full of key-points and bullet-points, those gems of knowledge will make your learning a whole lot more enjoyable and effective. They provide you with the fundamental knowledge of an entire chapter, and even allow you to create fill-in-the-blanks review sheets that you can use to test yourself (by the way, here’s a little tip, the bolded terms and concepts from those sections are the ones your professor will likely test you on in your exam, so don’t ignore them).

• MCQs and self-assessments - After you have mastered the material, it is time to see how much you know - and there’s no better way to do that than exploiting the MCQs and clinical scenarios at the end of each chapter. You don’t want to discover gaps in your knowledge during your actual exam, right? Therefore, take some time and work through those tests. The correct answers are in the corner of the page as well, albeit upside down, so you can instantly check if your understanding is fact or fiction.

Cons

• Too basic at times - Basic and fundamental knowledge is definitely excellent, but when you see that ‘Junqueira's Basic Histology’ explains the same knowledge in half the amount of pages compared to its competitors, you may start to question the quality. For some topics and concepts, you are definitely left with slight confusions or incomplete explanations - especially if you are the introspective, straight A’s medical student who wants to have the complete picture. Also, some histology professors feel that this textbook lacks sufficient details for their course. As you can see, the unique feature of this learning resource is also the chink in its armor.
• Poor text layout - Although the actual content and writing-style is easy to understand, the layout of text and paragraphs is at times far from perfect. The bolding is inefficient in many sections since the highlight is restricted to one term or the subject of the paragraph only. In addition, many pages have barely any formatting or bullet points, meaning that you get hit by a wall full of text. It’s definitely not a pretty sight with a subject such as histology…

• Lack of interactivity and online resources - With so many academic textbooks offering you additional online resources, interactive atlases, and test questions, ‘Junqueira's Basic Histology 14th Edition' still lives in the Ice Age or the dinosaur era. It’s true, there is a website containing all the microscopy slides in a virtual format, but the most you can do with them is zoom in and out, and pan around. As if this was not already rudimentary enough, even moving the camera around causes lags, making the virtual slides rather ineffective. Not to mention the lack of interactive labels or highlights.
• Inefficient self-assessments - Having MCQs and clinical scenarios at the end of each chapter is definitely a plus, but having them written down is an entirely different matter. Essentially, after you answer them once and check the solutions, you will remember the correct choice in some shape or form in future. As such, the self-assessments in ‘Junqueira's Basic Histology’ are somewhat of a one stop shop.
• Textbook - The simple nature of this learning resource is perhaps the biggest hurdle you need to overcome if you’re thinking of buying this textbook. In spite of its basic nature and having ‘only’ 525 pages, when it comes to histology, every additional page read feels like climbing mount Everest. Not to mention all the neck-craning that comes with reading textbooks, the boredom, the ‘Hunchback of Notre Dame’ feeling when carrying it around, and the associated hefty price-tag. You definitely don’t want to experience those for the one year duration of your histology course.

Junqueira's Basic Histology vs. Kenhub

As you can see, ‘Junqueira's Basic Histology 14th Edition’ has both its good and bad points. On one hand it definitely succeeds in explaining one of the most dreaded subjects in medical schools as thoroughly yet basically as possible. However, on the other side it can lack sufficient details for certain topics, it doesn’t have the clearest layout, and the lack of adequate online resources doesn’t help its cause either.

In this day and age, and with a subject like histology, you definitely need to learn ‘differently’ and as efficiently as possible. A great place to start would be Kenhub, an online learning platform that definitely keeps the pace with the 21st century and can spice up your learning in no-time. Here’s how it compares with ‘Junqueira's Basic Histology 14th Edition’:

Videos, reading, quizzes, atlases - it does sound quite appealing to have complete freedom over the way you absorb knowledge, right? With Kenhub, this is easier than you think. After a long day of staring at powerpoint slides in your lectures, reading even more would feel like putting a nail in your coffin. For those moments, you can simply chose a video about the topic that you were planning to read about and watch one of our experts explaining it to you instead. Don’t worry, this won’t involve even more boring powerpoint slides, and our anatomy geeks are actually a friendly bunch!

What about if you want to refresh your memory on a certain tissue that you learned about ages ago? You can start doing one of our quizzes - they’re far more effective for long-term retention compared to simply reading. They’re also powered by spaced repetition and active recall, the scientifically proven magic bullets of learning. By the way, all of these features are fully portable and seamlessly adapt to your device of choice - so no heavy books needed!. What are you waiting for? Go try them out and bring your learning into the 21st century.

Ultimately, however, the choice boils down to you and your preferred ways of studying. You can purchase the so-called best learning resource on the planet, but if it simply doesn’t suit you, you will never take full advantage of it and nor will you ever enjoy using it.

Instead, we recommend trying out a few resources that appear to be compatible with what you’re looking for from a study resource, weighing up their pros and cons, and making your own subjective decision on which is ultimately the best for you. We hope this article helped to make your decision that little bit easier. Good luck!