Book club

How did the idea for Kumar and Clark begin?

I had been asked to write a chapter on gastroenterology for another textbook of medicine. In fact, I'd always wanted to write a textbook as the ones that I had grown up with were so awful. In a conversation with Dr Clark, he suggested that if I wanted to write a textbook, “why don't we do it ourselves?” Naively, I thought it would take us the summer, or two months, to write the book. It took us two and a half years, and was very hard work. We wrote and rewrote every evening, and on holiday with our respective families. Of course we didn't just edit it but checked up some of the original references for each chapter (as we were not experts) and then rewrote some of them to make all the chapters consistent. Our authors were terrific. …