ABSTRACT
This chapter presents evidence that, far from being a reciprocal phenomenon, the presentation of medical news in the scientific press was sparse and unimpressive. If Thomas Mayo’s address rode several hobby-horses of orthodox medicine, it remained a rare example of a medical man urging an ‘increased acquaintance on the part of the public with medical and physiological principles’. Perhaps the best-known, and only, abortive attempt to provide specific medical information in a popular science journal in the nineteenth century is that of the English Mechanic. Even the Royal Society, which continued to have a large percentage of medically qualified Fellows throughout the Victorian period, shunned overt medical and surgical papers in the Proceedings and Transactions, and confined itself to anatomical and physiological papers. From the evidence of periodicals it is hard to resist the conclusion that Victorian medical men were likely to be better informed about science than their scientific colleagues were about medicine.
