Eds Roger Kirby, Michael G Kirby, Riad N Farah
Isis Medical Media, £39.95, pp 300 
ISBN 1 899066 92 6
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Rating: ★★★★
This morning I was told that one of my urological colleagues died on New Year's eve. He was 46, fit, and at the peak of his career. Such a story is all too familiar to Roger and Mike Kirby, two of the editors of Men's Health: their father died aged 49, just a few months after becoming a professor in cell biology. Left behind are young children who will not get to know their father and wives or partners who will have to cope with the loss for their remaining lives.
On average, men die five years younger than women do. The causes are age dependent: trauma in early life, cardiovascular disease and cancers later on, and suicide from the teens right through to old age. Dave Hill's parody of the “gender gap” summarises many of the issues: “As girls do better and better at school, boys trail behind; as women secure more and better jobs, men become more intimate with the schedules of daytime TV; while men kill themselves with increasing frequency, women lead lives that are not only longer, but also sweeter.”
The importance of Hill's description lies not only with his assertion that the future is female but with his explicit prediction that this will be increasingly so if current trends continue. Books such as Men's Health signpost the start of a reversal of such trends. In what other kind of book would you find contributions from urologists, family doctors, colorectal surgeons, psychiatrists, cardiologists, epidemiologists, and genitourinary physicians as well as experts in health promotion and risk taking behaviour? Each of these disciplines is concerned with a disease process or trait that is more prevalent in men than in women.
Bridging these fairly fixed interdisciplinary boundaries with a coherent theme is not easy, which is probably why so few have attempted to do it before. This book provides the male oriented specialist—whether a cardiologist, urologist, or traumatologist—with two valuable areas of expertise that are otherwise difficult to acquire. The first is an update on other male oriented specialties. When I'm talking to a man about measuring his prostate specific antigen I sometimes hear the question, “Why don't you check my cholesterol at the same time?” The chapter on lipids means that I can now answer with a degree of authority—something I couldn't do before.
The second and possibly more important reason why this book should be of use to those who advise men about their health is the information on maleness. The chapters on men's as opposed to women's attitudes to health in particular and risk in general are essential reading for those with an interest in male prevalent disease. I would encourage the editors to expand on this aspect of the book in subsequent editions and perhaps include sections on drug concordance, self management, and self efficacy as applied to men.
The book is touchingly dedicated to Roger and Mike Kirby's father. If further poignancy were required, two of the male contributors to the book (Brendan Devlin and Ian James) died prematurely in the short time between submitting their final copy and the book going to press. Next to their names, in brackets, is the word “deceased.”