Helping Physicians To Keep Abreast of the Medical Literature: Medical and Philosophical Commentaries, 1773–1795

• Literature, medical
• History of medicine
• Physicians
• Research

[Life is too short for a conscientious physician] to acquire—even with the most suitable education, unremitting observation, accurate investigation, and unwearied reading—  … satisfactory confidence in the unreserved treatment of the sick committed to his charge.

John Rollo, 1801 (1)

Like John Rollo (d. 1809)—an army surgeon trained in Edinburgh 200 years ago—today's conscientious clinicians wishing to keep up to date with relevant information face a truly daunting task (2). In response to this challenge, clinical epidemiologists at McMaster University, Ontario, Canada, in collaboration with others, initiated (3, 4) and continue to develop (5) the concept of “critical appraisal” of reports of research, encouraging clinicians to be ruthlessly discriminating in their reading. Building on these principles, they have been instrumental in promoting wide adoption of structured abstracts by medical journals (6) and in launching journals intended to help busy clinicians keep abreast of new, relevant, critically appraised evidence, such as ACP Journal Club and Evidence-Based Medicine.

Attempts to respond to the needs of busy people for relevant research information are not new, however. More than three centuries ago, two English-language journals—Weekly Memorials and Medicina Curiosa, both established in 1684—contained abstracts of articles and books published elsewhere. The contents of the former were mostly nonmedical, however, and the latter ceased publication after only two issues (7).

The following century, a periodical containing abstracts of scientific and medical books—Commentarii de Rebus in Scientia Naturali et Medicina Gestis—was published in Leipzig, Germany, between 1752 and 1798 (8). This German periodical was to be a model for the first English-language journal of abstracts of books relevant to busy clinicians, Medical and Philosophical Commentaries (Figure 1). It was launched in 1773 in Edinburgh (9), then a fountainhead of a quantitative approach to the assessment of medical practice (8). Between …