Journal of Anatomy is now freely available on the internet, from its origin in 1867 to a rolling 2-year embargo period before the current issue. The archive can be accessed at http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/; it provides a PDF file of every article, including book reviews, editorials, notices, etc., providing a fascinating insight into the history of anatomical studies.
Journal of Anatomy was originally entitled Journal of Anatomy and Physiology (1867–1917, volumes 1–50). It is clear from the nature of the early articles that the term ‘physiology’ meant ‘function’, a term that became part of the Journal’s subtitle in 2002. The change of title to Journal of Anatomy (October 1917, volume 51) was presumably instigated by Sir Arthur Keith, who took over as Editor in 1916, serving until 1934 (plus another two years as a member of an editorial group of five). Sadly, Arthur Keith is best known today for his championing of the Piltdown skull. He had been an active proponent of the veracity of the finds, and published two long papers in volume 73 of Journal of Anatomy (October 1938 and January 1939) making the case for a new reconstruction of the Piltdown skull and its evolutionary relationship to the recently (1935) discovered Swanscombe skull. Journal of Anatomy was at that time edited by Wilfred Le Gros Clark; ironically he was a member of the team who exposed the Piltdown skull as a forgery in 1953. Nevertheless, Keith’s interest in human and primate evolution has had lasting benefits for Journal of Anatomy, and this area remains a strength to this day. His anatomical interests were also wide-ranging, enabling him to be an outstanding editor who was credited with a major expansion in the Journal’s circulation and content. The October 1934 issue was dedicated to him, and it is a measure of his standing in the anatomical community that this issue includes 16 research articles and a dedicatory note that is both affectionate and appreciative.
The other major change in 1916 was that Journal of Anatomy became the property of, and ‘conducted on behalf of’, the Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Irish involvement has always been strong: a member of the original editorial team was from Dublin, and currently we have one from Cork.
Exploration of the archive has fleshed out many names that I already knew as former colleagues and teachers, often only in old age. A paper by Alice Carleton (January 1934) was of particular interest – I didn’t know her, but her rather glamorous photograph hung outside the Oxford dissecting room for most of my time in the department. She made the original observation that the periodicity of mitotic division in animal cells (mouse skin), based on material gathered at 4-h intervals over a period of 24 h, was abolished by continuous light but not continuous darkness. At the end of her article she apologises for its deficiencies, due to the difficulty of maintaining the 4-h sampling schedule when other duties intervened. Readers may not have realized that she was single-handedly teaching dissection to the women medical students, who were at that time (in Oxford, at least) not permitted to be taught by men. This is one among many treasures in the early part of the archive. Another is the classic (July 1934) paper on development and anomalies of the external ear, still quoted in human embryology textbooks, by Wood-Jones and Wen, a collaboration between Melbourne and what was then Peiping. Many other papers on human embryology stand out, including contributions by W. J. Hamilton and J. D. Boyd, who also served, separately and together, as editors (1952–59) and wrote (with H. W. Mossman) the textbook of human embryology that was the standard text for medical students for many years. Evolution was also a common theme: Frank Goldby, who gave me my first lessons in dissection of the human body in 1972, discussed the difficulties of elucidating homology in the cerebral hemispheres of reptiles when different workers had used different terminologies and investigative methods (January 1934). D. De Lange presented a state of the art (1936) review on ‘The head problem in chordates’, written before the contribution of neural crest to the skull was accepted, but including illustrations of rhombomeres and their relation to cranial nerve ganglia that are startlingly similar to more recently published diagrams. Important wartime studies on skin grafts were published by P. B. Medawar in 1943, 1944 and 1945 (these last two were reports to the War Wounds Committee of the Medical Research Council). The influence of the war is also reflected in a number of papers on nerve and muscle degeneration/regeneration by various authors, including W. E. Le Gros Clark, who was a major contributor of neuroanatomical papers to the Journal. G. J. Romanes (editor and co-author of my 1972 edition of Cunningham’s Textbook of Anatomy) was a Beit Memorial Research Fellow when he described a new silver method for staining paraffin sections of the nervous system (October 1946). The same 1946 issue contains a paper by Ronan O’Rahilly (then at Cork) describing radial hemimelia in the hands of a cook; his lifelong interest in human development and anomalies remarkably extends to his May 2006 paper on development of the amygdaloid complex.
I have mainly trawled issues of the 1930s and 1940s for these examples. Many other names resonated for me from this period, but I was attracted to my last example by its title: ‘Cracking in the metacarpo-phalangeal joint’ (April 1947). Had the Ig Nobel prizes existed at that time, this study would surely have won its authors an award. Other readers will find items that resonate with their own and their subject’s history, but if you are as prone as I am to getting sucked in, set aside plenty of time! It is fascinating to see how little the topics covered by the Journal have changed over the years – the current subtitle ‘Development, Evolution, Function’ would have been appropriate from the outset.
This wonderful resource has come to life through the generosity of the Wellcome Trust, in partnership with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) as part of their ‘Medical Journals Backfiles Digitization Project’. The project was masterminded by Robert Kiley (Wellcome Library), Martha Fishel and Carol Myers (both NLM), to whom we are greatly indebted. Digitization of the pre-electronic issues involved debinding a complete run of the Journal to provide flat pages, and we are very grateful to the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, for sacrificing their set. Further information on the medical journals included in the project can be found at http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/backfiles.