Women’s health and medical care is an essential component of any medical school curriculum. For some, OB GYN is a long six-ish weeks. For others, it is by far their favorite rotation. Whatever the case, you need to know your stuff to be an effective physician (in most fields) and do well on your rotation. Luckily there are only a couple recommended OB GYN books for medical students. You’ll just need one of them. Double luckily, there are a plethora of questions that you can use to prepare for your exam from ACOG via their uWISE question bank – unfortunately, these used to be free, but you now need your school to buy a license, or you can buy an individual one. If you do not have school access, individual access is fairly expensive; it may be more cost-effective to buy a question book, which we have included below. If you want to check out all of our recommended books, please click here. Here are our two recommended (and one optional) OB GYN books for medical students:

Case Files Obstetrics & Gynecology

This is another installment of the Case Files series. Some of these books are better than others; I think this one covers the material well, so it is one of our two recommended OB GYN books for medical students. If you learn best in a case-based format, this is your book (note: I personally prefer a more traditional textbook, if you do too, see below). Like the other Case Files books, this text will present a patient case (there are 60 cases total), explore the differential diagnosis, give background information, and also include some practice questions. Keep in mind that since guidelines change often in the field of obstetrics and gynecology, you should grab the most recent edition.

Blueprints Obstetrics & Gynecology

If the Case Files series is not your style, then Blueprints is your best bet as a text. The textbook is split into two sections: (1) obstetrics and (2) gynecology, and then further split into all of the necessary subsections. This makes it easy to reference when doing practice shelf/USMLE questions. In addition, this book has 150 multiple choice, USMLE-style questions at the end, with explanations. The only downside of this book is that there are several, noticeable grammatical errors. That said, it has recently been updated, and I don’t think the errors are egregious enough to not recommend it.

PreTest Obstetrics & Gynecology (optional: use this if you need more questions!)

If your school doesn’t have a subscription to uWISE (and you don’t feel like coughing up the absurd price for student access), then I would turn to Pretest. So, this is more of an optional OB GYN book for medical students. This is a great resource of 500 USMLE-style questions that will prepare you well for the shelf exam. That said, make sure you finish all of your UWorld questions – these tend to be closer to the real difficulty of the exam, higher-yield, and have more involved explanations!

Be sure to check out our other recommended books for all subjects and rotations over here!