Smaller

I was sitting next to JW in the Curriculum Retreat. In the middle of the morning he asked me, "Do you know what textbook of anatomy do our students use now ?"

"Probably the Moore," I said.

"That Moore ?" JW was incredulous - he made a gesture and showed the size of a 1500-page bible, which was what Moore used to be when we were students.

"Oh, don't be silly." I reassured him, "Yours is the Big Moore; I'm talking about the Little Moore."

"Quite right." He calmed down and remarked, "In fact we cannot blame our students for not reading much textbook. It is the trend all over the world that textbooks are getting smaller, although human structure did not change over the years."

I agreed in silence.

And he went on, "The paradox is, however, even for subjects with rapid advances, such as internal medicine, the size of the textbook also goes down. Do our students really have an information overload - as claimed by the educationalists ?"