Back in 1993, Cho Jae-hyoung, then a medical student at the Catholic University of Korea, was struggling with medical textbooks written in English.

At the time, aspiring doctors studied American or British textbooks written in English. There were Korean versions but most of them were poorly translated. Some books by Korean authors didn’t give an overall understanding for young students as they were specialized in a specific disease.

The situation has little changed.

While studying for his exams, Cho started to keep a journal by reorganizing the contents of textbooks in diagrams. The notebook became popular among his friends as a useful tool to better understand the complicated details of various diseases.

Then, an idea struck Cho ― publishing the journal into a book that was still written in English, but was a lot easier to understand.

Other classmates were skeptical about the idea, which had never been attempted even by renowned doctors. But his two friends, Ju Ji-hyeon and Jang Jeong-won, didn’t hesitate to join Cho for his ambitious project.

“We set two very specific goals: to sell our book on Amazon.com and to have the medical students at Harvard study with the book,” Cho said.

“That may sound ridiculous. But the specific goals made us to devote everything to the project,” he said.

Starting in 1996, Cho and Jang improved Cho’s original notebook, while Ju was responsible for collecting the photos of clinical cases.

Medical schools here regularly publish research on real clinical cases. But, Cho said, such useful data is often disposed of without being shared with more people.

In order to upgrade the contents of the book, Ju had to collect and scan nearly 20,000 vivid photos of real cases.

“Due to our busy schedule at hospital, we had to work on the book in our spare time. Unlike others, we were happy when we got draft notice because we were able to focus more on the project,” he said.

Then, the final draft was completed as a PPT file in 2003, seven years after they started the project.

Considering the small domestic market for the book, they first knocked on the doors of foreign publishers such as McGraw-Hill and Oxford University Press. Cho and Ju also visited London to do a presentation in front of the editors at Blackwell, a U.K. academic and journal publisher.

The publishers said they liked the idea itself but all they got were rejections.

Then, they visited Bobmunsa, a leading local publisher, whose chairman was willing to publish the book regardless of its success.

However, another problem arose. The files they had produced were in the wrong format.

Cho had no choice but to learn Adobe Illustrator by himself. It took another three months for him to change the format of the document without affecting the original text.

In 2004, the first edition of “Clinical Road Map of Internal Medicine” was finally published. It was the first medical textbook to be written by Korean authors in English.

In order to reflect the book’s Korean identity, Cho requested that the book have a cover design based on a traditional ink-and-water painting in which a classical scholar is looking at a map. He also added an ancient map which marks the disputed rocky islets in the East Sea as “Dokdo.”

In May this year, the second edition was published. This time, 122 other students, residents and professors participated in the publication. The 400-page book was expanded to 976 pages.

The first edition, which sold more than 4,000 copies, became the best-selling medical textbook after “Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine,” an American textbook which is the most widely read by medical students.

The second edition, priced at $170, has already sold 500 copies. It also started to be sold through Amazon.com from April.

In a recent e-mail, Ellen Song Kang and Andrew Ho Kang, a famous Korean doctor couple, called the book a “unique and logical presentation of medicine to the present day clinician-to-be.”

Andrew Ho Kang was the first Korean to graduate from Harvard Medical School magna cum laude in 1962.

“The algorithmic approach has yet to be made in American medical textbooks and your accomplishment must be heralded as a forerunner of others to follow,” said the couple who are currently living in Memphis, Tennessee.

“If you want something, you should want it from the bottom of the heart. People recognize when you hesitate to take risk. They are not impressed,” said Cho, 39, who is currently serving as an assistant professor of endocrinology at Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital.

Ju is an assistant professor of rheumatology at the same hospital, while Jang is an assistant professor of gastroenterology and hepatology at Incheon St. Mary’s Hospital.

“People talk about our current achievement. But I think the whole process is more important. Without passion, nothing is gained,” he said, adding that they are already working on the book’s mobile edition.

By Lee Ji-yoon (jylee@heraldcorp.com)