ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the characteristic features of the journals as a group and then, through several selected individual journals, looks at the way editorial work fitted into the changing occupational structures and values of the medical profession itself. The area between the total and the London portion becomes reasonably large during the 1890s, with the birth of several self-consciously local or regional periodicals such as the Sheffield Medical Journal or the Transactions of the North of England Obstetrical and Gynaecological Society. As a principal career, medical journalism has never been the joy – or burden – for more than a few, and this was certainly so in nineteenth-century Britain. Edward Gibbon would have described the attempt to discover all of the several thousand individuals involved in the editorial process for all nineteenth-century medical journals as of antiquarian but not necessarily historical merit.
