Principle

I must say I am not the best person - and probably not a suitable one - to talk about extrapolating available facts to form new knowledge.

You know what, TS, the other gold medalist of my class, used to study two tiny books (each no more than 300 pages) in his final years - one for medicine and the other surgery. Yes, he gathered much additional facts and pearls from clinical teaching. But, more importantly, he was exceptionally gifted for the ability of seeing the relation between facts and elaborate. In his hands, a 300-page Lecture Notes took the effect of a 3000-page standard text.

Of course, there is another type of learning behaviour. The autistic student (who became a malicious nephrologist later) in the opposite room of TS in the hostel was at the other end of the spectrum: He read gigantic texts, and often more than one for each subject. There was no need for an encyclopedic memory - all he could remember after finishing with those arm-breaking volumes was merely some relation between chapters and sections. To him, the 3000-page Principles was no more than a short Essential PassTest.

I'm not saying which method is better - just that you must decide which method would suite your style.

By the way, Harrison's is called the Principles, not because it describes only principles, but you should only remember the principles after reading it.