A professor’s initiative to write his own textbook will provide students with insight into diagnosing their own health problems. Biology lecturer Stanton Braude’s recently published textbook, “Case Studies for Understanding the Human Body,” has begun to circulate among classes at the University.

Braude followed other professors’ endeavors to write their own course books because they did not have material that met the needs of their students.

“It’s an incredible amount of work – no one does it for the money – but if the books out there aren’t teaching the way we do, or they’re not teaching it the way we know it’ll work for students, then people go to the trouble of writing a new one,” said Braude.

Thomas Woolsey, professor of experimental neurological surgery who co-authored two editions of “The Brain Atlas,” supports Braude’s reasoning.

“If the course is very unique and/or very popular, then I think some percentage of those professors would benefit from writing their own book, and their whole field of intellectual and practical knowledge would improve,” said Woolsey.

Braude’s textbook comprises case studies that use fictional stories to detail common diseases, such as “Thanksgiving Dinner Distress,” which focuses on problems in the digestive system. He began writing the stories to help students better understand his lessons in Human Biology, a course geared toward non-science majors.

“There was nothing else like this book,” said Braude. “There are case study books that are meant for medical students, but that’s way beyond this course. It didn’t seem fair that we shouldn’t be able to work with case studies just because someone else wrote the cases for medical students.”

Each of Braude’s case studies started out as a handout for class, but after he accumulated about a dozen stories, he decided to apply a case study for every topic and compile them into a textbook.

“Everybody likes stories, and so this is a way to make science more interesting by applying how things work in your body to stories,” he said. “It puts a human face on the science that we’ve been trying to understand.”

Senior Nadya MacAloon took Human Biology with Braude and read pre-press copies of the case studies, which she said were “wonderful supplements to the class textbook.”

“It was great to have real life illustrations and real world applications of the biological things we were learning,” she added.

Woolsey similarly feels that his own book fosters student’s comprehension of class material. He uses the reference book in multiple arenas, including his undergraduate classes, such as Principles of the Nervous System, graduate neuroscience courses, and in lessons for his medical school residents.

“We have PowerPoint presentations that use the images from “[The Brain] Atlas” to make points to students about different things we’re trying to convey,” he said.

Senior Puneet Singh is glad she had the opportunity to use Woolsey’s reference book when she took Principles of the Nervous System.

“When professors write their own book, students know they will get the most out of the material because the professor is an expert in the area and knows exactly the perspective that is presented in the book,” said Singh.

But not all students felt pleased at professors using their own textbooks in class.

“I feel like it’s kind of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you know what the book is about, but on the other hand, [the textbooks] are kind of just self-promoting, and don’t really accept any opposing views,” said senior James Smee, a psychology major. “My worry is that they’re too biased and it may not be the best book in the area.”

Randall Larsen, chair of the psychology department, who has authored three editions of “Personality of Psychology,” found that writing his own book helped students to absorb the material.

“The books that were in existence before mine were organized in a way that I found unsatisfactory, around all these theorists who had been dead for decades,” said Larsen. “Before I wrote my book, I reorganized my class to provide up-to-date material, and found that students not only liked the material more than the old theories, but that they also remembered it longer.”

Writing one’s own textbook can also present problems of finding new information for class lectures.

“The challenge for me is to bring stuff into the class that’s not in the book because I used some of my best material to write the book, and now I have to look for new material,” said Larsen. “I don’t want to repeat the material – students can read the books on their own and that would be boring for students.”

Larsen does not encourage professors to write their own textbooks, as it took up all of his discretionary time for five years. Instead, he feels that professors should work to provide students with stimulating information not present in the required textbook.

“Professors need to work on supplementing the book they decide to use – no book is perfect, but they can skip a particular chapter and insert their own material,” he said.

“When I was in college, one professor would read the book to us, as if we couldn’t read it, and that was horrible. Some professors essentially do the same thing by taking the textbook and making a PowerPoint outline, and I think professors need to be careful not to do that, and to instead add new things to their lectures.”

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