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107 Writing Medicine George M. Gould and Medical Print Culture in Progressive America jen฀ ni฀ fer฀j.฀con฀ nor Just when the twentieth century was dawning, in December 1899, an American medical editor told his audience about “the shocking abuses that have sprung up in the realm of medical journalism.” By recounting “evil tendencies” of journals owned by proprietary medicine manufacturers and self-promoting medical men, he maintained, “it will thus be seen that medical journalism is in a state of chaos.”1 A century later, this message of concern has changed little— and may still reverberate through the language of abuse and harm: “The whole business of medical journals is corrupt because owners are making money from restricting access to important research, most of it funded by public money,” pronounced former British Medical Journal editor Richard Smith in his book, The Trouble with Medical Journals.2 A self-styled iconoclast, Smith dissected the problematic state of late-twentieth-century medical journals in their peer review; authorship; editorship; research; and relationships with patients, media, and sponsors. His highly personal account echoes essays published in 2000, Ethical Issues in Biomedical Publication, edited by Anne Hudson Jones and Faith McLellan; this collection demonstrates that a powerful voice of alarm belongs to editors of medical journals: four of the fourteen essayists are or were editors of the most influential journals in medicine, and two were assistant editors.3 Indeed, the “Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals,” developed by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors in 1978 and adopted by several hundred medical journals, continues to evolve 108 ฀ jennifer฀j.฀connor as editors around the world demand that someone take public responsibility for the content and form of a written medical communication.4 Despite this vocal and sustained concern about medical journals over the course of the twentieth century, journals have not received extensive attention from historians.5 Little is therefore known about them within the context of print culture—whether the topic be the role of editors in their production and their reform; the professionalization of the medical editor; the nature of medical authorship; or the impact of external forces on the publication process. Still less is known about other forms of medical publication, such as the book, from the perspective of book history and print culture: instead of synthetic studies, such subjects as medical publishers or author-publisher relations have been relegated—as have their journal history counterparts—mainly to individual examples in chronological, bibliographical, or biographical accounts.6 Yet, as with studies by those actively involved in medical journals today, these topics were evident in the 1899 paper read by editor P. Maxwell Foshay before the Northwestern Ohio Medical Association and subsequently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. As he outlined ways to distinguish good journals from bad, his emphasis that “preference should always be given to journals that are owned and entirely controlled by medical men” implies experience with other kinds of journal ownership. Equally signifcant for Foshay was the editor’s role: “Know something about the character and reputation of the editor of the journal for which you subscribe,” he advised. “It is not in reason to expect a clean journal from the hands of a self-advertiser or of a man of doubtful reputation, nor on the other hand is it likely that a physician of good character will edit an immoral journal.” Foshay, who edited the relatively minor Cleveland Journal of Medicine, seemed here to recite the mantra of George M. Gould, an American medical editor of international stature who had been actively and widely promoting causes in aid of medical literature and its control by the medical profession. So well known was he at the time that Foshay’s listeners may have recognized and understood that it was Gould who exemplifed the reputable, trustworthy medical editor; indeed, the vocabulary of “abuses,” “evil,” “chaos,” “clean,” and “immoral” itself, as we shall see, suggests that Gould and his many communications had deeply influenced Foshay. Although George Gould had been a national medical editor for a few years before this time, he had recently increased his profle and stepped up his campaign for improved medical literature and its collection. His condemnations of medical publishers who refused to permit wider circulation of their books and journals through gifts to libraries and reprinting in textbooks were printed as circulars, published in medical journals, presented at medical associations around the North American continent, and subsequently drew...

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