Mark S. Greenberg MD

Mark Greenberg grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and majored in electrical engineering in college, where he had an early introduction to computers. While attending Northwestern University Medical School, he was given a little red book by the cardiovascular surgery service. It was chock-full of useful information, and it planted the idea of someday producing something similar for neurosurgery.

During his neurosurgical residency in Cincinnati, Ohio, he bought an original IBM PC—with no hard drive and memory measured in kilobytes. It would be a while before anyone else he knew owned a computer.

That computer became the tool for creating the prototypes of what would eventually become the Handbook of Neurosurgery. Those early versions were printed at night on the neurosurgery department's photocopier and distributed to the other residents. The first edition was published in 1990 through his own publishing company, Greenberg Graphics. A test run of 660 copies sold for under twenty dollars each.

There was no internet and no advertising budget, so existence of the book spread largely by word of mouth. After all 660 copies sold, a larger print run of the second edition followed in 1991. As sales continued to grow, Greenberg partnered with Thieme Publishers for the fifth edition in 2001—and was finally able to reclaim the family garage from the pallets of books stored there.

The Handbook of Neurosurgery is now in its eleventh edition. What began as notes photocopied for fellow residents has grown into a comprehensive neurosurgical reference organized into approximately 118 similarly sized sections for ease of use. The latest edition includes extensive updates and new material, with full-color illustrations throughout.