The American Medical Association Encyclopedia of Medicine. - book reviews

Harvard Health Letter, Nov, 1993 by Patricia Thomas

Books about health and medicine once occupied only a few feet of shelf space in the average bookstore. But today this category is more likely to fill an aisle than a shelf -- making it vastly harder for anyone to build a solid home medical library without breaking the bank.

In an effort to simplify this task, the editors of the Health Letter browsed through Books in Print, trade journals, and bookstores to see what references would be most useful to our readers. Early on, we decided to bypass the hundreds of volumes that contain a single author's pet theory about diet, fitness, and the like. Instead we looked for books that a health-conscious reader can use to answer pressing personal health questions and to satisfy his or her intellectual curiosity about medicine.

We focused on medical dictionaries, home health encyclopedias, nutrition references, drug handbooks, and books about first aid and self-care. At least two of us reviewed each title for accuracy, timeless, scope, accessibility, and value for cost. Many of the books we considered weren't good enough to recommend. The ones described here are, in our estimation, the best of the lot.

Definitions

Most people turn to a dictionary because they have encountered an unfamiliar terms and want to know what it means. But bookstores are full of medical dictionaries that may confound instead of clarify because they are meant for health professionals and are written in medicalese instead of plain English. Of the books we reviewed, two stood out as genuinely helpful for those who haven't attended medical school.

Webster's Medical Desk Dictionary (Merriam-Webster, 1986, 790 pages, $24.95 hardcover; new edition due 1994) looks and feels just like its general-interest sibling, the ubiquitous Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary.

The listings are comprehensive and up to date even though the most recent edition is from 1986. For example, "speed" is defined as "methamphetamine; also: any of various related stimulant drugs." The editors did not shy away from everyday speech: "turista" (traveler's diarrhea) is included, and one learns about "beta blockers" by looking under that heading instead of searching out the more technical term "adrenergic agents."

In the interest of simplicity, the editors ruled that all words used in definitions had to be already included in the Ninth New Collegiate or else their meaning added to the medical volume itself. For the most part this resulted in easily understandable prose. Sometimes, however, the decision to add more entries instead of simplifying definitions led to jargon-heavy passages that are bound to send one riffling through the book.

Historically minded readers will appreciate the short biographical sketches of figures -- real and fictional -- from whom eponyms are derived. The entry for Parkinson's disease is followed by notes about the British surgeon who first described it; the story of Oedipus is recapitulated under the heading "oedipal."

Despite its name, The Mosby Medical Encyclopedia (Plume, 1992, 926 pages, $18.00 softcover) is a dictionary to which nine helpful appendixes have been added. These cover such diverse topics as drug interactions, nutritional recommendations, and telephone numbers for state agencies on aging and for major organizations that provide information about specific health problems.

The volume includes more than 800 pages of definitions adapted from the C. V. Mosby Company's well-respected lexicons for nurses and allied health professionals. The editors who translated this material made it easy for general readers to find and understand: for example, they listed "inguinal hernia" in that manner, not as "hernia, inguinal." They consistently emphasized meaning over jargon and thought seriously about what people might really need to know. Drugs are listed by both trade and generic names, and the generic entries spell out why they might be prescribed, when they should not be used and what adverse effects they can have.

The text is supplemented by line drawings and 32 pages of undistinguished color illustrations. The book is a large paperback that might not hold up under heavy use, but it's a good buy considering the large amount of helpful information that it contains.

For people on tight budgets, however, a medical wordbook may be a luxury rather than a necessity. The major unabridged dictionaries do a creditable job of defining thousands of medical terms; a recent edition of one of these may suffice for most people.

Discussions

When people face a personal medical problem, they generally want more detail than a definition provides. A good medical encyclopedia goes further, explaining the ways in which the human body goes awry and how illnesses are diagnosed and treated. The hope is, of course, that such knowledge will help people make better decisions about their own health.

The number of medical encyclopedias on the market is expanding so rapidly that we may have missed some meritorious titles in this category. Of the ones we reviewed, our favorites were The American Medical Association Encyclopedia of Medicine (Random House, 1989, 1,184 pages, $44.95 hardcover) and The World Book Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center Medical Encyclopedia (World Book, 1993, 1,072 pages, $39.95 hardware). The latter was also the hands-down winner of our Cumbersome Title competition.