Handbook Of Neurosurgery Eighth Edition

HANDBOOK OF NEUROSURGERY EIGHTH EDITION
Preface
Shortly after finishing my residency training in 1989, in a time long before the Internet, I wrote the fırst edition of the Handbook of Neurosurgery with the intent to make practical, actionable neurosurgical information accessible at the fıngertips of the practitioner.
Over the years, I used desktop publishing technology to expand the scope of the book, and to incorporate diagrams and literature references. I always wanted to make the book “academic” by presenting data that backed up the assertions. My goal was to never publish a cookbook.
Without advertising, I relied solely on word-of-mouth to promote the book. I believed in the same thing that Edwin Land must have when he said, “Marketing is what you do when your product is no good.” I had a test run of 600 copies of the book printed at a small vanity press in Ann Arbor, and sold copies to individuals by mail. My big break came when the medical bookstore at the State University of New York in Syracuse purchased 6 copies to put on their shelves. After that, 1 regularly packaged 5 or 6 books in a box destined far various bookstores and dropped therrı off at the loading dock on my way to the O.R. in the morning. After a time, the major medical book distributors in the country began ordering cases of books and my garage became a shipping department. (I stili have the pallet jack that I used to unload the delivery trucks.) Then, somehow, international orders began to arrive.
I was finally able to get aut of the packing and transporting business when I partnered with Thieme Medical Publishers in 2001. At that time the İnternet was just becoming “a thing,” and while it was a great way to make connections, the information explosion was stili to come. The goal of the book regardless was stili the same-to make useful information readily available.
By the time the 6th edition was published in 2006, the process I used to produce the book was becoming more difficult. The page layout software that had been my workhorse far over 10 years was no longer supported, and the developers of the reference manager I utilized had changed their focus and the product was now compatible primarily with word processors (which were poorly suited far complex multi-chapter books like this one). As a result, I was forced to use an obsolete PowerPC computer and had to hack the chapter files in order to trick the reference manager to work with them! After the 7th edition was completed, I could see no way forward with this approach. 1 never imagined that desktop publishing was going to atrophy and fail victim to the same fate that would la ter come to daim print newspapers. With the availability of the world wide web, the internet was quickly becoming the chief means of accessing information on demand.
The birth of this 8th edition of the handbook that you are now reading was a particularly difficult one. Thanks to the people at Thieme, the material was painstakingly converted from the defunct software platform to a contemporary format that will facilitate continued updates and availability in digital media. This time-consuming and labor-intensive process included porting thousands of cross references, index entries, and literature citations.
lnterestingly, the objectives of the handbook have alsa gone through a transformation. it is challenging to distill what ali of those objectives are, but I believe that it is important to present material in a framework that can serve as a foundation far studying the field of neurosurgery. This book is intended to be a place that brings together the important information that is increasingly scattered across the literature and the web (far instance, practice guidelines far disparate subjects like spinal cord injury, stroke, aneurysms … ) that might not necessarily be encountered unless one is actively seeking it aut.
My goal with the book has always been to present infarmation succinctly and clearly. To that end, this edition is a completely restructured version of the Handbook of Neurosurgery, presenting the entire content in a collection of more than 100 well-ordered chapters of comparable length and format while retaining the wealth of crosslinks and references the book is known far. This new organization was designed to make the content more easily digestible and accessible – far both browsing the print book and navigating any electronic version.
With its new structure and format, as well as revised and updated content, 1 hope I have provided readers with an even more valuable resource in this 8th edition of the Handbook of Neurosurgery.
Handbook Of Neurosurgery Eighth Edition
Mark S. Greenberg, MD
Associate Professor
Department of Neurosurgery and Brain Repair
University of South Florida
Tampa, Florida