‘Medical Journal’ centenary

Press, 2 November 1987, Page 22

‘Medical Journal’ centenary

By

CHRISTOPHER MOORE

For 100 years, the “New Zealand Medical Journal” has been taking the pulse of medical news and views. This month, the “Medical Journal” was able to report that it is in good heart at 100. The centenary of one of the southern hemisphere’s oldest scientific and medical journals was greeted with few fanfares — the medical profession is not noted for wild outbursts of enthusiasm. Edition No. 833 (Volume 100) merely maintained the solid reputation established with the journal’s conception and birth in 1887.

Its densely packed furrows of type are not designed for mass consumption. Illustrations can still upset lay readers of a sensitive nature. The October edition included articles on the nasopharyngeal carriage of meningococci, blister neetle dermatosis and mirral valve prolapse — topics fascinating to any hypochondriac at large but often incomprehensible to the lay reader. But the “Medical Journal” has survived its first century ds the august voice of New Zealand’s medical profession.

It was not the first medical journal published in New Zealand. The “Homeopathic Echo,”

edited and produced in Auckland by a German medical graduate, Dr Carl Fischer, managed to appear in 12 monthly numbers from March, 1855, to February, 1856, before succumbing. By 1886, the New Zealand Medical Association was calling for closer links between New Zealand’s scattered medical profession. The first edition of the "New Zealand Medical Journal” appeared under the editorship of Dr Daniel Colquhoun, containing 15 papers drawn from case reports — 13 from Dunedin and two from Otago — and a two-page letter on typhoid fever in

Hawke’s Bay. By 1889, the journal was firmly established with articles on an epidemic of diphtheria in Lyttelton, treatment of simple fractures of the leg, and hydatid disease. Apart from a three-year period from 1897 to 1899 when it was amalgamated into the monthly “Australasian Medical Gazette,” the “New Zealand Medical Journal” has maintained its own identity, take-overs being somewhat rare in the medical world.

“The future seems secure,” it noted this month.

“The journal can never neglect the fact that today

medicine changes at a pace that would have been unthinkable in 1887. So must the journal adapt to change too.” The journal’s founding fathers would probably view the modern editions as somewhat undignified. The glossy colour advertisements for pharmaceuticals show that even the most solid of medical dowagers can kick up her heels when faced by rising production costs. But in spite of the seductive call of the advertising agency, some things never change. Doxycycline and photosensitivity, it seems, are still required breakfast table reading for the medical profession.