Medical Editing: A Guide to Learning the Craft and Building Your Career

By Barbara Gastel

From an award-winning instructor of medical editing, this is the first guide designed to introduce the field to prospective and early-career medical editors.
Medical editing is a thriving and wide-ranging specialty within the editorial profession. Its practitioners occupy a unique ecosystem that involves its own style manuals and the ability to work with highly technical medical terminology and issues, and its work helps ensure that health practitioners, researchers, and the public receive sound, understandable medical information. Today, opportunities abound for medical editors--who come from many backgrounds and work in many settings, such as medical journals, medical institutions, and the freelance realm.

Written by an experienced and award-winning editor, Medical Editing: A Guide to Learning the Craft and Building Your Career provides a thorough introduction to the profession. At levels ranging from the punctuation mark to the publication, Barbara Gastel provides accessible and concrete instruction in editing medical writing. Distinctively, the book also explores ethical issues encountered in medical editing and other topics such as working effectively with medical authors, editing medical writing by and for nonnative users of English, and editing medical conference presentations.

For those considering entering medical editing or transitioning from other employment, the book also provides helpful career guidance. Readers will learn about the range of medical editing positions, receive advice on taking medical editing tests for employment, learn about certificates and certifications in the field, and more.

Enhanced by examples, exercises, and humor, Medical Editing will benefit both prospective and beginning medical editors while serving as a useful resource for experienced editors, teachers of courses in related fields, and supervisors mentoring interns or new hires.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226844927
• ISBN13: 9780226844923
• Release Date: November 2025
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 288 Pages