'Wound Care' Reading Is Fundamental

Dear Readers,

“Do you know a good book about wound care that I can read?” “Where can I find information about wound care?” These are questions I am asked on a weekly basis. I am able to give an answer based on the information I have and the books that are available to me. Dr. William Olser once said, “…we have no better means of judging the intelligence of a profession than by its general collection of books. A physician who does not need a library, who does not read one or two of the best weeklies and monthlies, soon sinks to the level of the cross-counter prescriber.” What does it say about practitioners of wound care when we have a hard time recommending educational reading to our colleagues?

In recent years, the number of books written on subjects related to wound care has exploded. The number of wound care journals has also multiplied significantly in the past few years. The Internet has made many new sources of wound care education available to anyone with access to a computer. Multimedia presentations on CDs and DVDs are readily available to enhance our knowledge base in wound care. All of these sources of wound care information are great, but how do we find out about them and gain access to them? The Editorial Advisory Board and I would like to help remedy this situation. We at WOUNDS are interested in establishing and maintaining a bibliography of wound care educational resources. I would request that if you have favorite wound care books, monographs, journals, web sites offering wound care information, or other wound care related educational sources that would be beneficial to the wound care community, that you please send the information to me at woundseditor@hmpcommunications.com. Be sure to send all of the information about the material including title, author(s), publisher, and date of publication for books and journal name, number of publications per year, and contact information for the journal/book publisher. Feel free to recommend older books, but suggestions should be books or journals that are still obtainable. We shall do our best to organize the information and publish it in future issues of WOUNDS.

Thank you in advance for your help with this project. I am anxious to see what sources of wound care information are being used.

Osler W. Books, Libraries, and Medical Societies. In: Counsels and Ideals. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Co; 1905:160.




Terry Treadwell, MD, FACS