Merriam-Webster's medical desk dictionary.

For this review, Merriam-Webster was compared to Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary (27th ed., 1988); Stedman's Medical Dictionary (25th ed., 1990); Mosby's Medical and Nursing Dictionary (3rd ed., 1990); Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary (17th ed., 1990) and Webster's Medical Desk Dictionary (CH, Mar'87). While many words have been added to the 1993 Merriam-Webster, substantial revision of definitions in the 1986 Webster's did not take place. The following observations, then, are comparisons of both the Merriam-Webster and its forerunner with the other four titles. Definitions in Merriam-Webster are brief, precise, and often incorporate other medical terms, so that it may be necessary to check several definitions to obtain clarification of an unknown or poorly understood term. Merriam-Webster omits information contained in the other four dictionaries; for example, it does not mention that Alzheimer's is characterized by neuronal degeneration/atrophy of the brain; does not include "adrenal" in its definition of pheochromocytoma; and does not cross-reference manic-depressive psychosis to "bipolar disorder." Unlike the other dictionaries, it is not illustrated. Its unique features are a chapter on the history of medical English and a chapter on writing style. Unlikely to satisfy general readers or students, this book is recommended primarily to technical writers or physicians needing only to check the spelling or grammatical form of words whose meanings are already understood. K. Bradley; Bellevue Community College

At first glance, one may wonder why yet another medical dictionary is needed when there are such classics as Black's Medical Dictionary, Blakiston's Gould Medical Dictionary, and Stedman's Medical Dictionary. Merriam Webster's Medical Desk Dictionary, an update of the 1986 edition published as Webster's Medical Desk Dictionary, is written for laypeople. Its format and size remain unchanged. According to the publisher, there are more than 5,000 new words, and 6,000 definitions have been revised. Definitions for such terms as AIDS have been extensively revised to reflect the Center for Disease Control's new criteria. As in the previous one, some 1,000 biographies of individuals whose names are an integral part of the medical literature are included. The publisher claims that this volume "combines a medical wordlist (including British terms and spelling variants) selected and defined on the basis of citational evidence." Since there are several million medically relevant citations, a critical review of those included in this dictionary was made. Also, every word used in the defining vocabulary had to be in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. The result is a usable and understandable dictionary that includes pronunciation, capitalization, division, usage, and variants. There are no illustrations. The definitions are concise and technical but still understandable by the educated layperson. This dictionary will not replace the standard medical dictionaries in medical libraries but is the reasonably priced medical dictionary of choice for school and public libraries. It would be especially useful for secretaries and nonmedical users. (Reviewed June 1994)