Publication of "Physics for the Health Sciences"

Third Edition

We were very pleased with our progression from the 1973 self-published a spiral-bound text "Physics in Nursing and the Allied Health Sciences" to the first edition of Physics for the Health Sciences in 1975 and the Second Edition in 1980. The text still was still well-received even though fewer institutions were offering such applied courses for health professionals. W.B. Saunders commissioned us to do a Third Edition.

From the 300-page First Edition we added a significant amount of content so that the Second Edition was 385 pages. The expansion was more moderate to 411 pages for the Third Edition in 1985. Our text had become the leading text in the U.S. for this type of course, but unfortunately for the book, there were fewer institutions offering such applied physics courses for health professionals. So the 3rd Edition was the last.

The publishers were strongly encouraging me to write a regular standard physics text, but there were at least 250 such texts out there. By this time I was heavily involved in the Conceptual Physics course which I had initiated in 1980. It had given me a sense of need for an accessible helping environment for teachers which eventually led to the HyperPhysics Project.

The Third Edition started out reasonably strongly but then began to diminish. There did not seem to be a strong justification for a 4th Edition. The table at far left shows that there were significant sales of the Third Edition for twenty years, up to 2005, when it was taken out of print. The total for that period was 39,279 copies, raising the total sales for the three editions to 92,111 copies. "Physics for the Health Sciences" stayed in print for thirty years, 1975-2005.

The graph below shows the progression of the yearly sales of the textbook. That graph is a plot of the yearly numbers in the table to the immediate left.

There were mergers of the publishers and the project wound up with Harcourt-Brace. At some point the rights to publish "Physics for the Health Sciences" were transferred to Elsevier, and it continued to market electronic copies after the cessation of printing. Some royalty was received up to 2017 from Elsevier, called "Global Royalty". At that point it was indicated that 3000 electronic copies had been sold.

Out of curiousity on 3/15/19 I went to the web to see if it was still available and found this on Amazon.

There was one review that said "I have used this book for over 25 years for Physics class that is specialized and covers only classical physics. Modern physics cover modern physics and cost too much. This book is perfect for that class."

Another said "An excellent introductory physics text. Includes health-related applications of physics principles and useful illustrations."

Of course I'm not going to quote any reviews that bad-mouth it! Actually, these were the only two comments I found.

For a book published in 1985, I'm glad it still sees some use in 2019.