The Liverpool Medico-Chirurgical Journal : its past, present, and future / by Thomas H. Bickerton.

  • Thomas Herbert Bickerton
Date:
[1907]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The Liverpool Medico-Chirurgical Journal : its past, present, and future / by Thomas H. Bickerton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    economics; and recognising this, and the ability of the man, it is an unpleasant subject of contemplation that the Journal should have appealed to so comparatively limited an audience, while London medical contemporaries of lesser merit were destined to achieve success without maintaining a hand-to- mouth existence. Possibly it was the glamour of the metro- polis, and the antiquated notion that little good could come out of the provinces, which accounted for the relative ill-success of the Liverpool Medical Gazette in comparison with the Lancet, of which the first number was issued on Sunday, October 5th, 1823, and the London Medico-Chirurgical Journal, which preceded it by three years. Certainly it was not due to any lack of energy or ability, literary or otherwise, on the part of Dr Lane, that the Journal did not enjoy a national patronage. Perhaps this gifted editor and writer would have been better advised had he steered his literary bark clear of the shoals of medical politics. But if this constituted an error in policy, it was more than atoned for by the high literary excellence of Dr Lane’s mental offspring. When he presented the Gazette to the Liverpool faculty as a friendly medium of professional and scientific intercourse, he committed it to the hands of his brethren in the fullest con- sciousness that upon their exertions its continuance must depend. He alluded to the gloomy anticipations of those who regarded the medical atmosphere of Liverpool as uncongenial, either in consequence of its not yielding subjects enough or of its not affording ability sufficient to prepare the matter for the maintenance of a medical periodical. He doubted the justice of such conclusion—believing that in a commercial community of 200,000 people (for this was the population of Liverpool in 1833), having an infirmary, fever hospital, lunatic asylum, workhouse, two dispensaries, two eye infirmaries, besides other charitable institutions, there must be an abundance of material which, properly appreciated, might be converted to the support of a Journal, and to the advancement of medical science.