J. C. Segen

I started writing medical dictionaries in 1984 as a resident (registrar) in New York, and expected my efforts to spawn a small collection of pathology jargon with 150 pages of manuscript…7 years and 7000 pages later, I put the first iteration of the book on the shelf as The Dictionary of Modern Medicine (1992, Parthenon, UK) with 12,000 entries. I went mad and covered a skeleton "soup to nuts" of medicine, including informatics, molecular biology and forensics, etc., etc. In 1995, I updated it and added another 6,000 entries, and called it Current Medtalk. The third edition went out in 2006 with another 7000 terms, and squeezed in The Dictionary of Alternative Medicine).

I continued collecting material, but realised that paper is dead, so in 2009, began porting the word processed material over to a database to begin electronic publishing; I reckon it will take me another year to finish pulling in the last 60-80,000 entries. Last year I spun off The Doctor's Dictionary; it's the only dictionary with which one can curl up and have fun; try a free sample if you don't believe me. As of today 17.12.2011, the database has 111,448 entries, making it the second only to the Dorland's Medical Dictionary (I left the Stedman's in the dust ages ago) in terms of entries. The more it grows the easier it's becoming to produce stand-alone products, with the most recent spin offs are the Dictionary of British Medical Abbreviations and Acronyms (a real page-turner it is) and British Medtalk. The next products in the pipeline include a dictionary of histopathology and an A to Z of rare diseases with molecular mechanisms.

Because of circumstances that defy belief, I've had to take a long hiatus from pathology and will only get back to the microscope when I pass The Royal College of Pathologists exam, a mother of all exams (with a 35% to 45% pass rate, it's quite a challenge–I've already failed it twice). I'm scrapping by, but just barely, writing material for Farlex, a company that provides definitions for a wide range of terms. I expect to re-sit the exam next fall–three time's a charm?