UCSF Imaging's Dr. John Mongan Co-Authors "Radiology for Kids" Children's Book

John Mongan, MD, PhD, associate professor in our Abdominal Imaging and Ultrasound section at the UC San Francisco Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, recently published Radiology for Kids with co-authors Brandon Pham, MD, and Betty Nguyen. The book is the tenth title in Medical School for Kids, a charming, beautifully illustrated series by Pham and Nguyen that introduces children to medical specialties.

We caught up with Dr. Mongan for a Q&A about this fun project.

What inspired you to write a children's book? How did your collaborators influence the creation of this book?

My co-authors are my cousins. I saw one of their earlier books on ophthalmology (Dr. Pham's specialty) and, half in jest, asked them where the radiology version was. They were extremely enthusiastic about the idea, and the more I thought about it the more it seemed like a fun project and a great way to help the next generation have a better idea of what "behind the scenes" doctors like us do.

What insights did you gain about your teaching, clinical or scientific work in the process of writing this book? 

It's really challenging to describe technical things in a way that's engaging, doesn't use too many words that are unfamiliar to children, is technically accurate and fits in the three-to-four lines available on each page of a picture book! The process really made me think about the fundamentals of what we do as radiologists.

What did you edit out of the book?

My first version of the text had about a paragraph per page; my co-authors showed me that it really needed to be distilled into just a few sentences per page. There was also some more detailed material about different subspecialties of radiology and applications of different modalities that ended up being a little much and was condensed into single summary pages.

If you have a next book project in mind, could you tell us a bit about that... the idea or topic, audience?

No big ideas at the moment, but I know my coauthors are working towards a complete series of children's books that cover every medical specialty.

What else you'd like us to know about this project?

Stretching my mind in a new direction to do something different from anything I've done before was a great experience.