The first medical journal issued west of the Alleghanies was the quarterly Reporter o; Medicine, Surgery and Natural Sciences, issued at Cincinnati, 1822. The first Canadian medical periodical was the Journal de Midecine dr Quebec, issued in 1826.
The founder of medical journalism in its modern sense, as not only a carrier of news and information for physicians but also as a force for the uplift of the profession, the rep. lation of the practice of medicine, the direction of medical legislation, and the exposure of abuses, was Thomas Wakley, an Englishman. who in 1823 founded The Lancet in When this appeared there were a great many abuses, especially in hospital practice and medi cal education needing correction. Hospital posts and even sometimes medical professor ships had become family matters, subjects of inheritance. Hospital instruction was so gives that it reached but a very limited number. Wakley began by publishing the hospital lec tures of professors for the benefit of the profes sion. When Abernethy, the distinguished Lon don surgeon of the time, applied for an injunc tion against the publication of his lectures with out his permission, Lord Eldon decided tba: lectures delivered in hospitals were public property. The trial proved a good advertise ment for Wakley and his work, and after a time he was elected to Parliament and he became the most important factor in England for the cor rection of social abuses by legislation. The Lancet has always continued the work of its founder in this regard, and has been noted for its crusades against food and drug adultera tions, its campaigns for the correction of medi cal abuses, and its leadership of the medical profession of England generally for the amelioration of medical social conditions. The work of The Lancet was not only supplemented but extended in England, when the British Medical Journal, representing the British Medi cal Association, was founded in 1857. The association, organized in 1832, published yearly 'Transactions' until 1853, and then the Association Medical Journal, which was suc ceeded by the British Medical Journal after some five years. The British Medical Journal has come to be a most powerful factor for the correction of medical abuses and the exposition of impositions of various kinds upon the pro fession as well as the public. The American Medical Association, founded in 1847, did not establish its journal until 1883. This was scarcely more than a weekly 'Transactions' until under the management of Dr. George Simmons, at the beginning of the present century, it began to be thoroughly representative of the best interests of the medical profession in America and of the genuine medical interests of the public, taking its place worthily beside the British Medical Journal. The Journal A. M. A. initiated the reform of medical edu cation by securing four-year courses and full time professorships in the medical schools, and thus has secured a noteworthy reduction in the number of schools of medicine in the country, decidedly to the advantage of medical teaching generally. It was enabled to do this through its
reorganization_ of the American Medical Asso ciation which strengthened State and county medical organizations and brought a reform of their medical journals. The advertising abuses of medical journals were emphatically pointed out and an initiation of reform secured. The Journal A. M. A. has done extremely valu able work for the medical profession and the public in the exposure of quacks, the regula tion of physicians' registration and, above all, the analysis and exposure of so-called patent medicines, many of which selling in very large quantities. at expensive prices and bought par ticularly by the poor, were shown to contain either such harmful materials as alcohol or cocaine as their chief ingredient, or else to be made up of absolutely inert materials like salt or sugar and water, slightly colored.
The success of the London Lancet led to the foundation of the Lancette Francaise in 1828, which followed the plan of reporting hos pital lectures and afterward became the Gazette des Hopitaux, which still continues. The Gazette Medicate de Paris was founded in 1830. Other French journals in large numbers were founded in the second half of the 19th century and the weekly newspapers were supplemented by the Progres paying attention par ticularly to current medical items, Paris, 1873. In the last quarter of the 19th century a whole series of such weekly journals meant to carry medical news and represent the medical profes sion as well as organize the correction of abuses, were founded in various parts of the world. The Deutsche Medizin, Wochenschrift in 1875, Vrach in Saint Petersburg in 1880, and Geneva, Munich, Prague, Rome, Vienna and many other cities came to be represented in this way.
At the beginning of the European War, there were some 1,700 medical journals pub lished in the various languages. Their dis tribution was as follows: the United States had 630; Germany, that is, the German-speaking countries, 451 ; the French, 268; the British, 152; the Italian, 75; the Spanish, 29. This was entirely too many for the maintenance of such proper standards as would make them seriously valuable and prevent abuses. Many of them were published almost entirely as a means of propagating information for business purposes with regard to various drugs and preparations, the journals being established for this purpose, or the proprietors allowing their columns to be used for such exploitation because of the money paid for advertising. The more medical journals the lower the standards. The war, with its scarcity of paper, has brought an end to a great many of the proprietory medical journals and undoubtedly will in its course do much to purify the field of medical journalism.
Chereau, Journalisme Med icale Francais (L'Union Medicale, 1867); Garrison, Journalism' (article in (Ref erence Handbook of the Medical Sciences,' New York 1918), and of Medicine' (New York 1918, 2d ed.) ; Siidhoff, Was Mediz, Zeitschrift-Wesen im Deutschland' (Munich Med. Wochenschrift, 1903).