Mark S. Scheid

Thirty-Three Years of Dizzy Medical Writing and Editing: A Meta-Analysis and the Hall of Shame

In 1983, one of us (HLF) helped create a series of “Dizzy Awards”—awards for excellence in bewildering, unintentionally comical, or downright terrible medical writing. These awards honored Jay Hanna “Dizzy” Dean (1910–1974)—not for his glorious career as a major-league pitcher, but for his mangling of the English language as a popular baseball announcer. The winners, all excerpts from prominent medical journals, were the most outstanding head-scratching, eyebrow-raising, and occasionally knee-slapping examples of bad medical writing. Their sources were not identified in print but were available on request.