Odds are you have heard of the Kindle, a new electronic book “reader” made and sold by the online retailer Amazon.com. The company’s goal (besides making lots of money) is to make the reading of digital books the preferred routine. There have been other such attempts, but these were not accompanied by the revolutionary zeal of the Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. He intends to be the Gutenberg of 0s and 1s, and the readability of the Kindle—specifically its book-like look—makes one think it just might happen.
At the same time, people around the world are reading less, a sad fact documented most thoroughly in the United States in a variety of surveys over several decades. Fewer books are read, less time is spent reading them, and reading test scores have declined slowly. These changes can be correlated with the increasing penetration of television—not proof of causation but pretty obvious nonetheless. Sociologists speculate that reading may become “an increasingly arcane hobby” of a specific class. Scholastic, publisher of children’s books including the Harry Potter juggernaut, recently committed to a new book series that features Internet games and cash prizes. The online move from text to video-based information suggests that salvation for reading will not come from the Internet.
These two trends, the decreasing interest in books on the one hand, and the move away from the printed volume on the other, are enough to make a bookworm stay curled up in a tome. Yet medical book collecting has been a favored hobby of neurosurgeons in the century or so since our specialty was created. Harvey Cushing, of course, was an obsessed bibliophile who left a historical collection of great importance to Yale Medical School. In this he was influenced by his mentor and role model, William Osler, whose collection surpassed even Cushing’s and which now resides at McGill University. Geoffrey Jefferson was an admirer of Cushing and Osler, and he took up the hobby as well. In an amusing essay he notes the horror at which a collector reacts when asked if he actually has read any of his books.
Starting and building a book collection is more feasible than you might think. As with other items, the key is to focus on a topic of your interest. Any value you may accumulate over time will result from your passion rather than pure investment-driven purchases. And not everyone can or should seek a Vesalius. As a neurosurgeon you may take particular pleasure in buying a biography of Victor Horsley, Walter Dandy’s treatise on third ventricular tumors, or an 18th century work of Percival Pott. Any of these can be obtained for well under $1,000.
Neurosurgeons will continue to read to stay current. Perhaps we will indeed do more of our journal reviews in digital format. Maybe every book ever published will someday be available on a Kindle or its kin. But there is a distinct pleasure in holding old and used medical books and thinking of the bygone practitioners who used them and for whom these works were contemporary. And yes, they sure do look good on the shelf.
Michael Schulder, MD, is vice chair of the Department of Neurosurgery and director of the Harvey Cushing Brain Tumor Institute at the North Shore Long Island Jewish Health System, Manhasset, N.Y. Send topic ideas for Timeline to Dr. Schulder at [email protected]. The author reported no conflicts for disclosure.