Medical Writings Revisited

The turn of the millennium will mark the end of the third year of the Medical Writings section in Annals. In anticipation of the event, we have been giving some thought to where the section has been and where it could go. Medical Writings was originally conceived to replace our Literature of Medicine section, which had been devoted solely to narrative book reviews and shorter annotations. In the new section, we set out to provide both information about recently published books and software in a crisp new synoptic format and longer essays on a broad array of subjects.

We adopted the short, structured Book Note to provide rapid access to information on newly published books and software (most of them outside the usual menu of widely used textbooks) and set them in the context of already published works in a given field. Plans for the larger essays were initially somewhat less clear. We envisioned longer narrative reviews of several related books of “significant medical and societal importance” or “unusual works of fiction that have special messages for all of us …