OTM

Although I usually buy medical books on-line, it remains a pleasure to walk through a jungle of medical books in a traditional book store.

The problem of searching what you want in Amazon or places alike is you must have some idea what to look for. Depending on how you choose the key word, it is very easy to miss an entire topic or group of books. (Not to say very often we have little idea what we want - until that very volume flashes across your visual field.) That's the beauty of going somewhere flesh-and-blood: Everything available is there. Using the jargon of Bernard Woolley, you are shown with every details of the unknown unknown.

(The same argument also holds for our digital PDA: The amount of data stored is huge, but they would only appear when you look for them. With a Moleskine, I could see everything any time I flip through the pages - whether I like it or not.)

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This time, I find the new edition of Oxford Textbook of Medicine.

I still remember in his preface to the first edition of the Textbook, Sir David Weatherall tried to convince his readers that textbook of medicine would not become a dinosaur.

“Certainly, the basic and clinical sciences are moving so fast that no textbook of medicine can hope to be absolutely up to date. However, relatively few of the advances in these fields lead to major changes in patient-care, and those that do require several years of critical evaluation before they become an integral part of routine clinical practice.”

I shall leave it to you to decide whether OTM has become a dinosaur.