Medicine: Selected Diseases

Alert merchandisers are selling the U.S. books of the month, shows of the month, even fruit of the month. Latest item: disease of the month. Thought up by Boston Internist Mark Aisner, the new service offers a series of monthly booklets on the symptoms and care of interesting diseases (February selection: Essential Hypertension). The Disease-a-Month pamphlets are written by experts, distributed by Chicago’s Year Book Publishers, Inc., and come with a handy orange-colored binder. They are designed for doctors, but subscribers (10,000 to date) presumably include a few lay hypochondriacs. Price per year: $9.