Abstract
In the spring of 1983 I took over the Editorship of the Journal from Dr John Leahy Taylor who was by then the President of the Society (and a leading light at the Medical Protection Society). He himself had only recently stepped in after the longstanding Dr Gavin Thurston (a coroner) resigned. Thankfully, the Deputy Editor, Professor Hugh Johnson, stayed on and gave me valuable guidance and firm support in the early days. He was then a highly regarded forensic pathologist, but always had time for me and the Society's business until his tragic death at age 56 when he collapsed and died on the steps of the Old Bailey only a few years later. By then he was half way through his two-year term as President of the Society – and though comparatively young, I think he is the only incumbent who did not complete his stint.
From this brief introduction you may have gathered that the Editors of the Journal were senior specialist doctors with a keen interest in forensic medicine. The other officers were also middle-aged men – the legal and medical secretaries were lawyers – the legal secretary told me he was a solicitor who specialised in property work but he attended out of interest – and he always counted the number of people who attended the meetings. As a young woman barrister, the council members seemed very old, conservative and rather grand to me; attending council meetings felt like a visit to a gentleman's club that reluctantly also admitted a few women but was not sure it had made the right decision. Hugh was dismissive of Council when they resisted new suggestions to expand the Society and, e.g. to dispense with the joining fee (long gone) and kindly said “Leave them to me!” So I did.
In 1983 the Cold War was still on and the Iron Curtain very much in place with half of Europe still behind it. Brain stem death was keenly discussed and in 1987 we published an excellent analysis by Dr Christopher Pallis. In that same year we published a paper by Dr Alan Gilmour, then the director of the NSPCC, entitled Child Abuse – Does the Law Protect? (sadly, in 2013, this question remains a major issue) and HIV/Aids was about to spread worldwide panic just around the time corner and we published a paper discussing this soon afterwards. DNA testing for forensic use had yet to be fully developed and we had a paper on it. Test tube babies, and the mapping of the Human Genome were discussed by the cognoscenti – the few in the know and the Internet and World Wide Web, similarly.
Word processing computers were few in the first half of the 1980s (though in 1983 I was learning to use my expensive new BBC computer with its small memory and big floppy disks). Meanwhile at The Lancet they were still using electric typewriters though of course they had fax and a teleprinter. Faxes were popular though my home fax spewed out horrible shiny paper like a big slippery toilet roll and the quality was patchy and quickly faded. Printers did not like faxed material – they themselves were still setting type with hot lead and imported new mistakes each time. They had to be given a clear printout. Almost all of these copies came and went by post or messenger – though gradually people began to send disks as well as and then instead of printed out material – but the disks were not always readable by a different computer or quickly corrupted.
In the 1980s we communicated mainly by phone and short faxes which meant that you had a more personal relationship with contributors and editors – now it is almost all by email. As it happened, Hugh and I lived in nearby streets so we could drop in material and go through the hard copy and make changes on the page then and there. The printer had to decipher handwritten changes, but not too many, so some pages had to be retyped and errors crept in from both parties so proof reading was very important. The era of scribbling and then cutting up pages and pasting (literally with a tub of white gluey paste or a grey plastic bottle of Gloy) has long gone and I don't miss it!
In 1983 the Journal was a slim, small, blue-covered publication reminiscent of a school exercise book. Despite its dull exterior inside it was filled with fascinating talks given by the huge range of specialist speakers recruited by our lofty Council members who had valuable connections in High Places – and it also carried out accounts of Society business, an Editorial and on occasions, book reviews. Yet I was excited to take it on and made plans with Hugh Johnson to develop the Journal's content. We began to carry case reports and to encourage original writers to submit work. After he died I was again fortunate in recruiting the series of dedicated and skilled medical deputy editors who have followed him. In consequence the Journal has increased its size and weight with increasing contributions from all over the world (thanks to the Internet) and in which we aim to maintain a good medico-legal balance.
These days we expect that we will be in instant communication all round the world and that there is a proliferation of specialist journals (of which the M-LJ was a very early example). It is really a relatively recent phenomenon. We have witnessed and experienced the burgeoning growth and specialism of clinical negligence litigation with its attendant literature (when I qualified in 1972 there was just a single chapter in the tort text book) much of which was supported by Legal Aid – originally reluctant to testify against their peers, many more highly qualified and reputable doctors became willing to shop their colleagues who provided an unacceptable standard of poor care – the group action was born (and special rules devised to manage it). These cost the Legal Aid fund (and the tax payers) an enormous sum and were soon fiercely reined in, and now with Legal Aid almost squeezed into history they are unlikely to flourish in the future. Indeed, the once unthinkable scenario in Britain has arrived: American style funding with conditional fee agreements and with the lawyer potentially entitled to reward him/herself from part of the successful claimant's damages. The Government's determination to limit claims brought against the NHS and to stem the haemorrhaging cash flowing into Legal Aid in all its guises for all kinds of purposes are splendidly summarised in Linda Lee's article at page 95.
But what do I foresee for the next 30 years? I will only offer a short term forecast: Our Past will also be our Future. SAGE, our new publishers, are currently digitising the content of all our back issues dating back to the first publications by the Society in 1901 and by the beginning of 2014 it is hoped that the whole of this amazing wealth of knowledge will be freely and virtually available to all our members at the click of a mouse. We plan to celebrate this exciting project by taking a selection of past titles and republishing key extracts along with a commentary reconsidering the issues. In some cases social norms and laws will have moved significantly while in others the old French adage “plus ça change plus ça reste la meme chose?” may be depressingly appropriate. Whichever applies, the intellectual challenges of this exercise will prove thought provoking and valuable – and if you have any particular titles and papers in mind and are willing to provide a contemporary review of them – please let us know.