From a Tattered Merck Manual to All the World’s Knowledge on my Phone

A clinical encounter from 1980 recalled in a 2010 blog post and just think how far we have come since then.

We certainly live in the knowledge economy, a world where having information and knowing how to use it is the key to success in just about any field.

And there’s so much more of it now. I remember having a book when my children were young titled something like encyclopedia of trivia. Just one thin volume? That’s unfathomable now.

Back in 1980 in one of my first rotations in my Swedish internship, which was a 20 or 21 month affair, I was a prison doctor in a sparsely furnished room with only two books on the bookshelf. One of them was a well read older Merck Manual which helped me make a diagnosis that seemed life-changing to one of the inmates.

I now can check Google AI, Epocrates, Up-to-Date, the National Library of Medicine and countless other websites from my iPhone 13 mini, which fits easily in my left front pant pocket. If I’m looking for the exact name or the exact treatment or the main criteria for any diagnosis, it is literally at my fingertips and it has been for several years so I think I am part of a groundbreaking generation of physicians who went from looking things up in a book to checking them out on my personal iPhone.

It’s a little bit like my grandfather‘s experience with cars, having been the first one in his village to drive one, or my parents experience with charter flights to the Mediterranean. Once exotic, later commonplace inventions changed the world in less than a generation in the last 100 years.