The Irish Journal of Medical Science — a historical outline

A minor consequence of the creation of the Irish Free State was a new title for an old journal. I refer to the Dublin Journal of Medical Science (the official organ of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland) which in March 1922 was renamed the Irish Journal of Medical Science. The change did not entail a seismic shift, though something of the kind did occur when AK Henry's departure for Egypt as professor of surgery in the University of Cairo left the editorial chair vacant in 1925 and it was offered to William Doolin (1887-1962). Doolin's accession proved to be a momentous occasion for a journal aspiring to be of national stature; he introduced an impressive, larger format in 1926 with new and additional features. And so when in the first year of a new millennium, we bid adieu to Mr Tom Gorey — thanking him for his painstaking ministrations — while extending a welcome to his replacement, Mr Tom Walsh, the compulsion to look at the periodical both en face and en profile is irresistible. I am, therefore, pleased to accept the editor's invitation to provide an outline of his journal's history. The major sources for this task are at hand in Wilde's `Preface" and Kirkpatrick's article on Irish medical periodicals.2 The former explains that the exceptional 18th century Irish medical men who desired to publish their observations were accommodated by The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The few medical periodicals published in Ireland in the first quarter of the 19th century were ephemeral. These included The Dublin Medical and Physical Essays, the Dublin Hospital Reports, the Transactions of the Associations of Physicians, etc., and when Robert Kane brought out yet another journal in 1832 there can have been little enough about it to predict its exceptional success.