“The book has to flow well, it has to feel good, and you have to feel as if it’s fun to read.” – Dr. Avroy Fanaroff
Dr. Richard Martin and Dr. Michele Walsh and I all consider ourselves to be physician educators as well as physician scientists, and we take great pride in putting an educational product out that is very readable. It’s not stuffy, it’s not pretentious, and yet the information is there. None of us like to pick up a book that’s dense, without an illustration, without a table, where at the end of reading half a page you say “What did I read?” The book has to flow well, it has to feel good, and you have to feel as if it’s fun to read.
When we were working on the third edition in the late 1970s/early 80s, Dr. Martin and I wanted to brighten the book both in appearance and in the quality of the writing, so we radically changed the contributors and we got a much better looking cover, and to our shock the book won the American Medical Writers Book of the Year award. That was the third edition of Fanaroff and Martin’s Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine. Dr. Walsh joined our team a couple of editions ago and we’ve been a wonderful team ever since. What we’ve always tried to do in every chapter is include the basic science of the disorders and of that particular organ system, and then apply the clinical approach so it’s not just the physiology and pathophysiology, but also how a clinician applies this on a daily basis.
With each edition we’ve tried to include a new chapter that reflects a major change in the field. So if we go back a number of editions, there isn’t a chapter on ethics, there’s very little on fetal intervention, there’s nothing on medical-legal issues, and no international section. All of these have evolved over the last few editions. We’ve tried to broaden the contributors to reflect not just a North American approach, but a global approach and to use more European contributors.
Bio
Avroy A. Fanaroff, MD was the Gertrude Lee Chandler Tucker Professor and Chair of the Department of Pediatrics and Reproductive Biology at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He also served as the Director of Neonatology and physician in chief at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital in Cleveland. He is currently Emeritus Professor Case Western Reserve University, and Eliza Henry barnes Chair of Neonatology. He is globally acknowledged as an international authority in the field of neonatology, and has contributed greatly to literature in the area of neonatal medicine, with particular focus on pulmonology, nutrition, and sepsis. He is co-editor of Fanaroff and Martin’s Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine, 9th Edition and Klaus and Fanaroff’s Care of the High-Risk Neonate, 6th Edition.
Dr. Fanaroff has been recognized for his contributions to the field with numerous honors and awards, including the Apgar Award, the Professional Education Award and the National Neonataology Education Award from the American Academy of Pediatrics, and has been honored with an honorary fellowship from the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health in London and honorary doctorates from the University of the Witwatersrand (his alma mater) and the University of Turku, Finland.
Related Authors: Richard J. Martin, MB, FRACP; Michele C. Walsh, MD, MS; Jonathan M. Fanaroff, MD
