Memorable medical textbooks of the past

Medical textbooks were not always as dreary and as bland as they are now, according to BMJ. Some examples of lively, first person didactic tone come from J L Burton’s Essentials of Dermatology:

"The Lord Privy Seal is neither a lord, nor a privy, nor a seal" and "‘seborrhoeic’ warts have no relationship to seborrhoea."

"The simultaneous occurrence of scabies in a doctor and a nurse may mean that they have shared nothing more exciting than a patient with Norwegian scabies."

Explanation:

The Lord Privy Seal (or, more formally, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal) is the fifth of the Great Officers of State in the United Kingdom. Originally, its holder was responsible for the monarch's personal (privy) seal (as opposed to the Great Seal of the Realm). Though one of the oldest offices in government anywhere, it has no particular function today.

Seborrhoeic keratosis (seborrhoeic wart, basal cell papilloma) is a benign overgrowth of the basal cells of the epidermis. The patient is usually elderly and concerned because the lesion is unsightly.

References:

Failure of modern textbooks: Memorable textbooks. BMJ 2010;340:c2857.

Image source: Seborrheic keratosis, Wikipedia, GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.

Books that reference ClinicalCases.org and CasesBlog

Internet cool tools for physicians By Melissa L. Rethlefsen, David L. Rothman, Daniel Stéphane Mojon:

Some Blogs We Like: "Clinical Cases and Images – Blog (http:// casesblog.blogspot.com/) – This consistently interesting blog written by Dr. Ves Dimov features case histories, medical news, images, and useful practical technology tips."



Healthcare and the Effect of Technology: Developments, Challenges. Stefane M. Kabene - 2010:

"Giustini (2007) provided a summary of useful Web 2.0 applications in medicine (eg, Ves Dimov's Clinical Cases and Images Blog; Ask Dr. Wiki; Ganfyd."

New Directions in Intelligent Interactive Multimedia - Page 517 George A. Tsihrintzis, Maria Virvou, Robert J. Howlett - 2008.

Computational Intelligence in Healthcare 4: Advanced Methodologies - Page 319 Isabelle Bichindaritz, Lakhmi C. Jain, Sachin Vaidya - 2010.



Medical librarian 2.0: use of Web 2.0 technologies in reference. M. Sandra Wood - 2007.

Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies - Page 76 Jan Zimmerman, Doug Shalin.

Ubiquitous Health and Medical Informatics: The Ubiquity 2.0 Trend and Beyond. Sabah Mohammed, Jinan Fiaidhi - 2010.

The Hospitalist Manual - Page 308 - Manish Mehta, Arun Thomas Mathews - 2009.

"The doctor in literature: Private life" by Solomon Posen at Google Books

"This is a structured, annotated and indexed anthology dealing with the personality and the behaviour of doctors, and doctor-patient relationships - ideal for medical humanities courses."

Atul Gawande: "Doctors are human. We miss stuff" - Checklists can help

Atul Gawande on NPR:

Doctors are human, and that their profession is like any other.

"We miss stuff. We are inconsistent and unreliable because of the complexity of care," Gawande says. "I got a chance to visit Boeing and see how they make things work, and over and over again they fall back on checklists. The pilot's checklist is a crucial component, not just for how you handle takeoff and landing in normal circumstances, but even how you handle a crisis emergency when you only have a couple of minutes to make a critical decision."

References:
Atul Gawande's 'Checklist' For Surgery Success. NPR.

Related:

Digital piracy is rapidly spreading to books and e-books

From CNN:

Digital piracy, long confined to music and movies, is spreading to books. And as electronic reading devices such as Amazon's Kindle, the Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble's Nook, and smartphones boost demand for e-books, the problem may only get worse.

Textbooks are frequently pirated, but so are many other categories including professional content, such as medical books and technical guides, a lot of general fiction and non-fiction. It really runs the gamut.

Some authors have even gone as far as to shrug off e-book technology altogether. J.K Rowling has thus far refused to make any of her Harry Potter books available digitally because of piracy fears.

However, Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers.

References:
Digital piracy hits the e-book industry. CNN.

Related:

Available at Google Books: Our chest pain chapter from the textbook Comprehensive hospital medicine

Embedded below is "Chest pain chapter from Comprehensive hospital medicine: an evidence based and systems approach, by Mark V. Williams, Scott A. Flanders, Winthrop F. Whitcomb, Franklin A. Michota, Jr. M.D, Elsevier Health Sciences, 2007, 1045 pages. The co-authors of the chapter are my former colleagues from Cleveland Clinic, Ashish Aneja and Paul Grant.

Medical Textbooks and Atlases Searchable on Google Books

This is a list of some medical textbooks that are searchable on Google Books. Check the "Books" label of this blog to see more.

Mini Oxford handbook of clinical medicine By Murray Longmore, Ian Wilkinson, Supraj R. Rajagopalan

See below the chapter "Thinking about medicine" from the Oxford handbook of clinical medicine:



Pathophysiology Made Incredibly Visual! By Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

Color atlas of allergic diseases By Martin Roecken, Gerhard Grevers, Walter Burgdorf

Rubin's Pathology: clinicopathologic foundations of medicine By Raphael Rubin, David S. Strayer

Atlas of clinical diagnosis By Mohammad Afzal Mir

Color atlas of dermatology By Gary M. White

Color atlas of pathophysiology By Stefan Silbernagl, Florian Lang

First Aid for the Internal Medicine Boards By Tao Le, Peter Chin-Hong, Tom Baudendistel

Color Atlas of Acupuncture: Body Points, Ear Points, Trigger Points By Hans-Ulrich Hecker, Angelika Steveling, ELMAR PEUKER, Joerg Kastner, Kay Liebchen

"I have an empty Kindle. What is a must-read book for flight to Paris?"

This is an example of one of the best uses for the Amazon Kindle e-book reader:

Robert Scoble was "stuck in a plane" before a long transatlantic flight and asked his followers:

• Scobleizer
  
  
  
  "I have an empty Kindle. What is a must-read book for flight to Paris?"
  
  

A few minutes later, the replies started pouting in (see the complete list here):

Wow a TON of great book ideas: http://twitter.com/scobleizer/favorites with more coming every second! I bought a few of these, thank you!

And now that I have a bunch of books on my Kindle we are off to see @Loic in Paris. See you on the other side of the pond.

RT @AaronStrout: @Scobleizer have you read The Road? If not, you MUST. <-- Agreed /via @DerekMassey OK I am getting this. Yes, the Kindle replaces books for me. Totally. How else could I have purchased the Road while stuck in a plane? Gotta go.

Amazon CEO on Kindle growth: "It’s astonishing"

From the NYTimes:

Of all the books that Amazon sells, what percentage are digital books?

For every 100 copies of a physical book we sell, where we have the Kindle edition, we will sell 48 copies of the Kindle edition. It won’t be too long before we’re selling more electronic books than we are physical books.

How quickly are paper books migrating into their digital equivalents?

When we launched Kindle two years ago, it was 90,000 titles, and today it’s more than 350,000. We’re adding thousands of titles every week. Our vision is every book ever printed in every language, all available within 60 seconds.


Video: What Can Amazon Kindle 2 Do for You?

What do you say to Kindle users who like to read in the bathtub?

I take a one-gallon Ziploc bag, and I put my Kindle in my one-gallon Ziploc bag, and it works beautifully. It’s much better than a physical book, because obviously if you put your physical book in a Ziploc bag you can’t turn the pages. But with Kindle, you can just push the buttons.

My opinion: With the recent addition of PDF support for Kindle2 (the smaller version), you can carry hundreds of presentations/lectures. Kindle also has text-to-speech and the font sizes are kind to the eyes. The free Internet access through a device-based browser is unmatched among the current e-readers. The $259 price tag is a bit steep but this is a useful learning device that is as groundbreaking as the iPod touch was when it first launched.

Video: Medieval Helpdesk Solves Problems With a New Technology: The Book.

References:

Book Learning. NYTimes.

Transbook: The Book That Contains All Books

Amazon Kindle is the early prototype of the mythical "transbook".

From WSJ:

So far the new technology has been called the "e-reader," a term obviously picked by engineers, not poets. In literary terms it's a transbook, by which I mean that it is the book which can contain all books. A book is a singular object that can contain many voices, but the transbook has the potential to be a singular object containing all voices. It is not just another kind of media; it is the dream of ultimate text.

We are still in early days, but it is obvious where the transbook is headed: It will eventually provide access to all text that is non-copyright, and to the purchase of every book in or out of "print." Kindle 2's boast of being able to hold 1,500 titles will eventually sound as ludicrous as those early ads for floppy disks boasting that they could hold up to 64k of data. We will want everything and we will get it. Possibly there will eventually develop a subscription service, which provides access to all books for a monthly fee. At any rate, a single object will contain the contents of all the world's libraries.

References:
The Book That Contains All Books. WSJ, 2009.
Image source: Amazon.com.

Video: Nook, Barnes & Noble’s Answer to Kindle

Nook, a new ebook reader by Barnes & Noble.

Nook looks nice but does not have a browser - the Kindle does. See a chart that shows how the Nook stacks up in the e-reader race http://bit.ly/35Qwum


Video: What Can Amazon Kindle 2 Do for You?

References:
Video: What Can Amazon Kindle 2 Do for You?
Link via OpenCulture.com.
Not Yet the Season for the Nook. NYT, 12/2009.

Updated: 12/09/2009

How Doctors Think

And now for a bit of shameless self-promotion. My review of "How Doctors Think," a new book by Dr. Jerome Groopman of Harvard Medical School, is in the current issue of TIME Magazine (the one with a photo-shopped image of Ronald Reagan crying).I don't recommend many books but this one is definitely worth your time. It looks at the kinds of mental traps or cognitive errors that can lead a