17 November 2000

Word comes to us that the British Medical Association has included the recent book by Donald Caton, MD, What a Blessing She Had Chloroform in its prestigious 2000 list of  prize winning and recommended medical books...Dr. Caton's book is one of the titles "Commended" in the "Basis of Medicine" category...all books in that category are listed below and more information about the BMA annual book awards follows....

AJ Wright, MLS
Dept of Anesthesiology Library
School of Medicine
University of Alabama at Birmingham
ajwright@uab.edu 

 

Basis of Medicine
First prize
Evidence-based medicine: how to practice and teach EBM 2nd ed. David L Sackett; Sharon E Straus; W Scot Richardson; William Rosenberg; R Brian Haynes. Harcourt Health Sciences, 2000. £18.95


Highly commended
William Osler: a life in medicine. Michael Bliss. OUP, 1999. £27.50


Commended
A dictionary of the history of medicine. Anton Sebastian. Parthenon Publishing Group, 1999. £58.00

What a blessing she had chloroform: the medical response to the pain of childbirth from 1800 to the present. Donald Caton Yale University Press, 1999. £20.00

 

Thursday 16 Nov 2000 - issued by BMA London Office
BMA Medical Book Competition 2000 Winners
Fifty of the best books and information sources in medicine have been awarded prizes in the prestigious British Medical Association's Medical Book Competition 2000. The winners include publications from popular medicine and patient information categories, as well as detailed clinical works for doctors.

The 2000 BMA Medical Book of the Year Award is The growing hand: diagnosis and management of the upper extremity in children, edited by Amit Gupta, Simon Kay and Luis Scheker and published by Mosby in 2000.

It is the first attempt to provide a standard, comprehensive view of this specialist field and both reviewers and judging panel felt that it had succeeded completely in doing so. The book opens with a short introduction to the evolution of the human hand, covers the diagnosis and treatment of inherited and other conditions and ends with a useful section dealing with particular issues arising in the developing world and with three papers covering important areas for the future. The growing hand also won the first prize in the Surgery and anaesthesia section.

A total of 50 prizes (9 First Prizes, 21 Highly Commended and 20 Commended Prizes) have been awarded from a total entry of 332. The number of entries was 15% higher than the previous year.

The prize of BMA Medical Journalist of the Year goes to Jo Revill, until recently health correspondent of the London Evening Standard. Nigel Duncan, the head of the BMA press office writes that "she has produced a consistently high standard of reporting for many years on health matters relating to the capital and across the country and her recent series of articles on health systems in other countries was particularly illuminating".

The BMA Patient Information Award (PIA) was established in 1997 to encourage excellence in the production of patient information. Interest in the award continues to grow: 12 awards were made from a total entry of 153. This year, for the first time, separate awards have been made to printed materials and to web sites.

The winner of the PIA printed section is Smoking and your heart: information for people who already have coronary heart disease, and their families and friends, produced by the British Heart Foundation. In 32 small-format pages it packs a great deal of information about the effects of smoking and how to quit, ending with contact information for those looking for help to stop smoking.

A new PIA award acknowledges the increasing importance of patient sites on the world wide web. Thirty-seven web sites were entered for the pilot award for web sites primarily aimed at consumers. The first prize was awarded to <http://cancernet.nci.nih.gov/> produced by the US National Cancer Institute. Reviewers and judging panel alike were highly impressed with the way the intuitive, clear structure of the site is enhanced by an elegant clean site design. The information provided is of good quality and is enhanced by references which link to the PDQ bibliographic database and to other good-quality sites.

In the Popular Medicine category, first prize goes to Small steps forward: using games and activities to help your pre-school child with special needs by Sarah Newman from James Kingsley Publishers. In the Mental Health category the first prize is aimed at GPs. Called Treating people with anxiety and stress: a practical guide for primary care the book is by Greg Wilkinson, Bruce Moore and Pascale Moore and is published by Radcliffe Medical Press.

For the first time the 2000 competition includes an award sponsored by BMJ Books for the best entry produced by a membership-based association of medical or health professionals. For this award, the emphasis is placed on the quality of the information, content and its relevance to the working clinician. The inaugural BMJ Books Non-Commercial Publication Award is made to the Royal College of Physicians for their National clinical guidelines for stroke which was produced by Professor Derick Wade and the Intercollegiate Working Party for Stroke.

Bob McKee, the Chief Executive of the UK Library Association, presented the awards at a ceremony at BMA House in London on the evening of Wednesday November 15 2000.

Full details on all the prize winners are attached. Information on how to enter titles for the 2001 competition, may be obtained from Helen Elwell, the competition's associate director, at the BMA Library (tel: 020 7383 6582; fax 020 7383 2544; email helwell@bma.org.uk) or from the Library's website at: http://library.bma.org.uk/

 

 



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