Editorial
The Journal from 1812 to 1989 at NEJM.org
N Engl J Med 2010; 363:1175-1176September 16, 2010
- Article
If information is not in digital form, it may as well not exist for today's researchers. That is what we have heard from those who oversee medical and scientific libraries. For several centuries, doing serious research meant spending hours in a major library, usually deep in the solitude of the stacks, exploring through heavy, bound volumes of the print literature. There was no alternative. And until this summer, for readers of the Journal there was no alternative for all that was published before 1993, since that is where the full-text online archive began. That has now changed. At NEJM.org, every issue of the Journal is available in electronic form all the way back to the first article, “Remarks on Angina Pectoris” by John Warren, published in January 1812.1
The more recent part of the archive from 1945 through 1989 is presented in an HTML format similar to that used for current issues, with full text, tables and figures, PDFs, and tables of contents. The older archive from 1812 through 1944 contains tables of contents plus PDFs of individual articles. The entire archive is fully searchable. This is possible because every page of the Journal was first scanned, using high-resolution technology to produce PDF files, which were then read, using optical character recognition, to produce the HTML. Tagging and indexing according to specialty were done by computer algorithm and Medline tags as far back as they were available. These processes are not perfect, and readers may find some errors that have been missed, especially in the older content.
The entire archive consists of 8498 issues with 486,434 pages and 145,969 articles with 75,649 images. The success of this huge electronic-conversion project required first finding a paper copy with all pages in satisfactory condition for every issue from 1812 through 1992. Some of these copies were difficult to locate, and some were missing from the Journal's own paper archive. We are indebted to Harvard's Countway Library for the loan of several rare, fragile originals from the 19th century. For any readers who find an error, please let us know at nejmredesign@NEJM.org so that it can be corrected.
The archive is being provided primarily through institutions, which can purchase either one or both parts. Institutions can then offer it without restriction to all who access the Journal through that institutional subscription. Individual subscribers receive 50 “tokens” per year for 24-hour access to an archive article. Access to content in the archive is also available on a per-article basis. Browsing of the titles and tables of content is easy and available to all. For all subscribers, unrestricted access to full text has been extended back to 1990.
There are several relevant landmarks in the Journal's historical archive. The Journal was founded in 1812 as the New England Journal of Medicine, Surgery and Collateral Branches of Science, and the first editor was John Collins Warren, a surgeon from the Massachusetts General Hospital. It was published quarterly until 1828, when it was merged with a weekly medical newspaper, the Boston Medical Intelligencer, to become the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, which was published each Tuesday (although during 1827 it was published as the New England Medical Review and Journal). The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal was published weekly for 100 years, but after encountering financial difficulties, it was sold in 1928 to the Massachusetts Medical Society. This journal was serving the Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont Medical Societies, so the name was changed back to the New England Journal of Medicine.
The early pages of the Journal contain anecdotes of cases, new treatments of diseases, and reprints of lectures and talks given by eminent physicians in New England and Europe, as well as news of physicians in the area and even local meteorologic summaries and a long treatise in 1837 on the climate of Santa Cruz (now St. Croix).2 This early archive includes the classic 1846 description by H.J. Bigelow of the first use of ether, “Insensibility during Surgical Operations Produced by Inhalation.”3 One finds everything from “On a New Method of Determining the Quantity of Urea in the Urine”4 to “The Production and Management of Bees”5 (both from 1854) and from “Salicylic Acid in Rheumatism”6 to a grisly treatise on “Hanging as a Fine Art”7 (both 1876). This unfiltered historical record of American medicine also contains a surprising number of entries in the early 19th century about “alleged malpractice.” In the issue of April 13, 1865, the day before Abraham Lincoln was shot, one finds a report about the sudden death of a healthy, robust 19-year-old man. The physicians conscientiously review the difficult details, trying to understand whether this death was because of a congenital ventricular septal defect or rupture of the interventricular septum.8
From the first issue of the more recent archive on January 4, 1945, one sees examples of the evolution of modern medicine, such as in a scholarly article on the Waterhouse–Friderichsen syndrome, with attempts to understand the causative agent in this decimating physiological cascade.9 In the same issue, there is a comprehensive review article on porphyrin metabolism, which begins by noting that the average physician sees the topic as “bewilderingly complex.”10 (Some things do not change.) In 1948, there is the early report with some hope about a terrible disease: “Temporary Remissions in Acute Leukemia in Children Produced by Folic Acid Antagonist, 4-Aminopteroyl-Glutamic Acid (Aminopterin)” by Sidney Farber et al.11 The most widely cited review article appears in 1967 in five parts: “Fat Transport in Lipoproteins — An Integrated Approach to Mechanisms and Disorders” by Fredrickson et al.12 In this era, there are the philosophical insights of Lewis Thomas, published as Notes of a Biology-Watcher, and the international perspective consisted primarily of John Lister's reports called By the London Post. The final volume in the Journal's archive includes the news-making, research-changing report from the Physicians' Health Study on the use of aspirin to prevent myocardial infarction.13 We hope that readers will find the new digital archive useful and informative.
Disclosure forms provided by the authors are available with the full text of this article at NEJM.org.
- References
References
1
Warren J . Remarks on angina pectoris. N Engl J Med Surg 1812;1:1-11
Full Text2
Tuckerman J . Observations on the climate, &c. of Santa Cruz. Boston Med Surg J 1837;16:357-64, 373
Full Text3
Bigelow HJ . Insensibility during surgical operations produced by inhalation. Boston Med Surg J 1846;35:309-317
Full Text4
Draper JW . On a new method of determining the quantity of urea in the urine. Boston Med Surg J 1854;50:49-50
Full Text5
The production and management of bees. Boston Med Surg J 1854;50:15-17
Full Text6
Towle SK . Salicylic acid in acute rheumatism. Boston Med Surg J 1876;94:593-595
Full Text7
Hanging as a fine art. Boston Med Surg J 1876;94:197-198
Full Text8
Jackson JBS . Congenital interventricular opening of the heart in an adult of robust health; or rupture of the septum two months before death? Boston Med Surg J 1865;72:209-211
Full Text9
D'Agati VC ,Marangoni BA . The Waterhouse-Friderichsen syndrome. N Engl J Med 1945;232:1-7
Full Text | Web of Science10
Welcker ML . The porphyrins. N Engl J Med 1945;232:11-19
Full Text | Web of Science11
Farber S ,Diamond LK ,Mercer RD ,Sylvester RF Jr ,Wolff JA . Temporary remissions in acute leukemia in children produced by folic acid antagonist, 4-aminopteroyl-glutamic acid (aminopterin). N Engl J Med 1948;238:787-793
Full Text | Web of Science | Medline12
Fredrickson DS ,Levy RI ,Lees RS . Fat transport in lipoproteins -- an integrated approach to mechanisms and disorders. N Engl J Med 1967;276:34-44, 94
Full Text | Web of Science | Medline13
Steering Committee of the Physicians' Health Study Research Group
Full Text | Web of Science | Medline
