The BMJ Group, UK, has announced that every article published since the British Medical Journal's first issue in October 1840 is now freely available online from bmj.com. Eighteen of the BMJ Group's specialist journals - including Heart, Gut and Thorax - are also available.
The archive includes some famous names and important articles which have purportedly changed the world of medicine. For instance, in 1847, James Simpson used the BMJ to publicise his work on chloroform, paving the way for modern anaesthetic techniques. And in 1867, an article by the young Joseph Lister introduced the concept of antiseptic to promote wound healing. At the turn of the 20th century, a study by Patrick Manson and Ronald Ross - two rivals in tropical medicine research - established the theory that mosquitoes transmit malaria. And, in the 1950s, the BMJ published two landmark studies that have transformed the way we live today. The first by Richard Doll and Bradford Hill confirming the link between smoking and lung cancer, and the second by Alice Stewart, showing a link between low level radiation and childhood leukaemia, which led to today's radiological safety standards. Other famous names from the archive include David Livingstone, Arthur Conan Doyle and Florence Nightingale.
Creating a complete and fully searchable BMJ archive has taken nearly a decade and was made possible by the US National Library of Medicine and the UK's Wellcome Trust and Joint Information Systems Committee. For the BMJ alone, this involved scanning over 824,000 pages, often from thin, friable paper.
For an introduction to the archive, a series of specially commissioned videos focussing on some of the important issues and individuals that have appeared in the journal's pages are now available at http://podcasts.bmj.com/themes/bmj/mp3/
archive_videos/BMJ_archive_the_stories.mp4
