This past weekend, because of a series of unfortunate events, I had to move a lot of furniture. This included the bookshelves in my home office. I began by taking books off the shelves to make the bookcase easier to move.
After blowing away a few pounds of dust, I found myself staring at tomes that were once the center of my life: Robbin’s “Pathological Basis of Disease,” Cecil’s “Essentials of Medicine,” Stryer’s “Biochemistry, Grant’s Method of Anatomy,” Stedman’s “Medical Dictionary,” and a few others. All of them more than 30 years old.
Dr. Allan M. Block
I piled the books up on a table as I moved the bookcase, thinking about them. I hadn’t opened any of them in at least 20 years, probably more.
When it was time to put them back, I stared at the pile. They’re big and heavy, qualities that we assume are good things in textbooks. Especially in medical school.
Books have heft. Their knowledge and supposed wisdom are measured by weight and size as you slowly turn the pages under a desk lamp. Not like today, where all the libraries of the world are accessible from a single lightweight iPad.
I remember carrying those books around, stuffed in a backpack draped over my left shoulder. In retrospect it’s amazing I didn’t develop a long thoracic nerve palsy during those years.
They were expensive. I mean, in 1989 dollars, they were all between $50 and $100. I long ago shredded my credit card statements from that era, but my spending for books was pretty high. Fortunately my dad stood behind me for a big chunk of this, and told me to get whatever I needed. Believe me, I know how lucky I am.
I looked at the books. We’d been through a lot together. Long nights at my apartment across the street from Creighton, reading and rereading them. The pages still marked with the yellow highlighter pen that never left my side back then. A younger version of myself traced these pages, committing things to memory that I now have no recollection of. (If you can still draw the Krebs cycle from memory you’re way ahead of me.)
Realistically, though, there was no reason to hold onto them anymore. I’m about two-thirds of the way through my career.
Plus, they’re out of date. Basic anatomy knowledge hasn’t changed much, but most everything else has. I started med school in 1989, and if I’d been looking things up in 1959 textbooks then, I probably wouldn’t have gotten very far. When I need to look things up these days I go to UpToDate, or Epocrates, or other online sources or apps.
I carried the majority of the books out to the recycling can. (It took a few trips.)
Facing some now-empty space on my bookshelf, I put my next challenge there: A pile of 33-RPM records that I still can’t bring myself to get rid of.
Dr. Block has a solo neurology practice in Scottsdale, Ariz.