War Surgery book

Mike wrote a couple of days ago about the War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq book. We were able to get a disc with all of the images used in the book. For the last several months, on and off, I've been assigning each digital version a number, tracking down the corresponding one in the book and cross-referencing the number there, and building a spreadsheet with the numbers, diagnoses, and captions as noted in the book. When, if, I ever finish, it will all be uploaded into our database.

Here are two images I numbered today.

Radiographs of hand fracture stabilization with Kirschner wires.

War Surgery book wins award

Dave Lounsbury one of the editors and authors wrote to me today saying:

I recv'd a letter today informing me that "War Surgery in Afghanistan & Iraq: A Series of Cases, 2003-2007" has won a national book award.

The American Medical Writers Association in Rockville, Maryland announces that "War Surgery": "is the winner of the distinguished 2009 AMWA Medical Book Award. AMWA's annual book awards "were established more than 30 years ago to recognize the very best in ... non-fictional medical writing." The textbook was "1 of 18 submitted ... and was evaluated by a panel of 4 judges."

The award will be formally presented in October in Dallas at the AMWA's 69th Annual Conference ... which may explain why notice of this award is not presently noted on its website www.amwa.org.

[For the record, the textbook was also nominated last spring for a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award, but in the end was not selected.]

The book has received uniformly favorable reviews from deployed medical officers (British & American) and in both lay (NYT, New York Review of Books, and The Economist) and peer-referenced (JAMA, NEJM, and Environmental & Wilderness Medicine, the journal of the Wilderness Medical Society) literature, as well as in the open media (BBC, NPR).

This is an excellent book, in the grand tradition of military medical publications, dating back to the Medical & Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion. You can download the whole thing for free at the link above, or order the book from the Government Printing Office.