The Nurse's Almanac . Nurse's Quick Reference . The Nurse's Reference Library A series of clear, well-illustrated manuals. There are volumes on assessment, procedures, diseases, diagnostics, and signs and symptoms. No encyclopedia for medicine is really satisfactory for health professionals.
Doctors use instead the latest editions of medical textbooks.
Check ref RC 46 for recent textbooks on internal medicine, and try the name of the speciality in a search of the catalog to see if we have recent textbooks in that speciality. For medical encyclopedias written for non-professionals, check ref RC 81. The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy has every word from the nearly 3,000-page handbook of medicine, and the index works well. It is authoritative, but it is written for health care professionals rather than patients. Pharmacology Individual drugs are described in a number of reference books of which some are written for professionals, some for lay men.