Mark S. Greenberg MD

Mark Greenberg (1955- ) was born in Chicago, Illinois. In college, he majored in electrical engineering where he gained early exposure to computers. He attended Northwestern University Medical School, and it was there, during his cardiovascular surgery rotation, that he was given a little red book that contained information on drugs, cardiac angiograms, and even particulars about what medications each attending liked and disliked. It was at this time that he decided that he would produce a book like that for neurosurgery. In 1983 Dr. Greenberg began his neurosurgical residency in Cincinnati, Ohio. In November of that year he bought the first IBM PC model - with no hard drive, and the memory was measured in kilobytes. Work on the first edition of the Handbook of Neurosurgery began on this computer, and later migrated to the Mac platform because of superior graphics capabilities. Early versions of the book were printed on the neurosurgery department's photocopier at night, and distributed to the other residents. The first real edition was published in 1990 by his own publishing company, Greenberg Graphics - a name he made up when a commercial printer asked him for the name of his company. The first edition had a print run of 660 copies, selling for under 20 dollars each. Without the internet and with no advertising budget, the existence of the book spread by word-of-mouth, and after successfully selling all 660 copies, a real print run of a second edition was made in 1991. As sales increased he was able to partner with Thieme Medical publishers in 2005 for the 5th edition, and could finally get rid of all the pallets of books in the family garage. The most recent version of the Handbook of Neurosurgery is the tenth edition, and is packed full of useful information critical in the day-to-day care of neurosurgical patients. There are full color illustrations throughout to enhance readability, and it has been organized into about 100 sections of similar size for ease of use. Dr. Greenberg sincerely hopes that it will continue to provide useful information to caregivers of patients with neurologic and neurosurgical conditions.