Book Review on Selective Pointers through Allen’s Keynotes by Dr. Anil Singhal

Sometimes the most useful new book is the one that takes you back, with clarity and economy, to an old love. I first opened H. C. Allen’s Keynotes in 1984 at NHMC, Delhi, a thin volume that has travelled with me through wards, clinics, and decades of practice.

For more than forty years that book has been the small drum that keeps time in the background of my prescription.

About a year ago, while browsing online, a title leapt out at me—Selective Pointers through Allen’s Keynotes. The promise tucked inside those two words—“selective pointers”—felt honest and practical. I ordered it immediately.

Later, when Dr. Shyam Kumar Vaishnav wrote to me requesting a review, I told him that I already owned his book; in truth, I had been using it in exactly the way I think he hoped it would be used: as a quick, clinic-side instrument that refreshes memory and sharpens attention.

The value of this book sits in its organizing idea. Dr. Vaishnav does not rewrite Allen and he does not attempt the impossible task of compressing Materia Medica into clever mnemonics. He takes a humbler, more valuable path: he curates what is clinically decisive, groups similar symptoms together, and sets them where a busy mind can reach.

We do not move line by line; we scan, we triangulate, we look for the decisive hint. This book is built for that mental movement. It invites you to enter Allen from a different door—through age groups and genders, through habits and addictions, through seasons and life phases, with helpful reminders of what to do and what to avoid while managing a case.

The structure is straightforward. Twelve sections hold the matter. The reader sees women and girls as distinct study spaces; the young and the old appear with their typical patterns; drunkards and smokers are gathered under addictions; pregnancy and the climacteric receive their own attention; seasons and months are mapped where remedies tend to appear more insistently.

The emphasis on pediatric and gender-based groupings, and the convenience of remedy lists at the point of need, make the book particularly attractive for students facing vivas and for interns learning to connect classroom lines with living cases.

The language is clean, the entries are compact, and the tone is quietly clinical. It aims at bedside use and achieves it. I can see this text being read by a BHMS student as a first map to remedy personalities; by a postgraduate as a warm-up to a seminar; by a teacher during a ward round to spark a quick discussion; and by a practitioner after a case, to check a differential without sinking into a long chapter.

Selective Pointers through Allen’s Keynotes does not pretend to replace Keynotes; it returns you to Allen better prepared to hear him.

I should also acknowledge the energy of its author. Dr. Shyam Kumar Vaishnav is a young physician with a scholar’s discipline and a volunteer’s heart. He ranked high in AIAPGET, completed his MD in Materia Medica, has been active in CMEs and medical camps, and worked in public-spirited ways during the pandemic. He has already co-authored the updated Collector’s Boericke’s New Manual and now gives us this selective guide to Allen.

It is good for our literature when younger colleagues take up the slow, painstaking work of arranging, checking, and presenting classical material with fresh usability.

If I could leave one final thought for readers who are considering it: approach Selective Pointers as you would a well-made index card—concise, reliable, and meant to send you back to the source with sharper attention.

I recommend it warmly—to students who want a strong start, to scholars who appreciate a tidy instrument, and to practitioners who know that clarity is the most compassionate form of speed. Add it to your working shelf. Keep Allen open beside it. And let the two talk to each other in your clinic, as they have been talking in mine.