Guaranteed in every UK's Junior House Officer's coat pocket
The Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine is a life saver. In the truest sense of the word: In the hands of an anxious and overwhelmed JHO facing an ill patient, this will give him enough help until his more experienced SHO arrives and bails him out.
Now in it's fifth edition, the book has been around since 1985 and was initially written by junior doctors for junior doctors. Being on call in a british hospital can be a very scary experience for a young, newly qualified medic, who is roaming the wards alone, making life and death decisions for the first time, always with that nagging doubt in the back of his/her mind that things are completely different from university and ER: people vomiting and shitting on your nice white coat, horrible nursing staff and no senior back up for miles and miles.
The O.H.o.C.M. in the coat pocket is mobile backup: it's 800 compact pages are easy to manoevre, there's ample space for notes, the lifesaving paged are printed with a red border so you can find the easily in dim light and the book fits easily in every coat pocket (Between the used iv lines, lunch, chewing gum and a copy of the independent).
It covers every sub specialty of internal medicine, has a chapter on surgical procedures and even has some very helpful pages on bedside philosophy, self protection and -care and manages to squeeze in a couple of good stories.
I honestly don't know any JHO without it. Which is a good thing.
Just in case you or me are admitted to a british hospital at night.
Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine; Oxford University Press, 1985-2003