For over 100 years, the pharmaceutical company Merck has published The Merck Manuals, a series of books providing information on the diagnosis and treatment of disease. There are editions for both medical professionals and consumers. Doctors often pay $65 to purchase the hard cover book, now in its 18th Edition. A version of this book geared at consumers sells for $40. Additionally, Merck provides a free online version of many of its books. You can see all of the books and links to the online versions here.
Two of the more popular texts are the (professional) Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy and the (consumer) Merck Manual—Home Edition. While you can access free versions of these texts online, Merck is now selling versions for the iPhone developed by Agile Partners that are formatted for the iPhone screen and don't require an Internet connection. The professional version is $29.99 and the home version is $9.99. Agile Partners gave me free copies of both to evaluate, and they are very nice apps.
In the professional version, you can browse through entries by section, explore an index of terms, or find an entry by browsing a list of symptoms. You can also do a full text search for a word, view a history of the entries you recently viewed, view a list of entries that you have marked as your favorites or even jump to a random entry.
Each entry has a wealth of information about a disease or condition. The entries are as long as a substantive Wikipedia entry, but unlike Wikipedia where anyone can add information, the Merck Manual entries are written by over 300 medical experts so the information is trustworthy. There are three buttons at the bottom of each entry, one which brings you back to the home, one which brings up options and star which adds an entry to your list of Favorites. There are currently two options. You can change the font size to large, or you can e-mail an entry. When you e-mail, the app doesn't send the text, but instead sends a link to the same entry in free online version of the Merck Manual.
The home version of the Merck Manual is written for consumers. There is less content, and it is geared towards what you would need to know in the home. For example, instead of a section called "Find by Symptom," the similar section in the home version is called "Emergencies & Injuries."
The Emergencies & Injuries section contains a list of common ailments:
There are a few areas in both apps where I could see improvement. I wish you could tap at the top of the screen to scroll the top of an entry, as you can in most other iPhone apps, because many of the entries are quite long. There are also a few pages that are not formatted for the iPhone screen and which require scrolling left and right to read them. I understand why it was done this way for large tables, but there are a few other pages that could have been better formatted. But these are just minor nits; for the most part that apps work very well.
Perhaps the largest downside to these apps is the price, considering that you can get the online versions with essentially the same content for free. The apps are better formatted for the iPhone screen and a lot easier to use, but the web pages do a decent job of displaying on the iPhone, assuming that you have a network connection.
I suspect that many lawyers have, like me, found the need to look up medical terms, such as during a break in a deposition. And many of us will at some point find ourselves looking for the remedy for a bee sting, snake bite, etc. You can always just fire up Safari and do a Google search on your iPhone and, with enough digging, you'll probably find the information that you need. But the Merck Manual apps are excellent sources of medical information and it is very useful to have all of this information at your fingertips on the iPhone for quick and easy access.
Click here for The Merck Manual - Professional Edition ($29.99): 
Click here for The Merck Manual - Home Edition ($9.99):
