Abstract
We recently learned with sadness of the death of Dr John Moll, the founding editor of the Journal of Medical Biography between 1993 and 2002, at the age of 77.
John Michael Henderson Moll made many contributions to rheumatology, his area of special clinical expertise, whilst working in Leeds and then in Sheffield. These achievements will surely be noted elsewhere, so in this appreciation, we confine ourselves to some of his interests in medical history.
In the early years of the Journal, between 1993 and 1996, he contributed to each issue a series of medical “Others,” the sequential list of which displays the extraordinary breadth of his interests: Charcot, Paracelsus, Waren Tay, William Saunders, Theodore Billroth, Malpighi, Hermann von Helmholtz, Lavoisier, Louis Pasteur, Thomas Henry Huxley, Carl Ludwig, Alfred Velpeau, Robert Graves, and Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud. Sadly, none of these is listed on PubMed, but all are available to subscribers through the JMB website.
He was also the author and illustrator of books chronicling the Presidents of the Royal Society of Medicine 1 and the Heberden Society, 2 the former published by the RSM Press, who also published JMB (the Journal was his original idea) from 1993 until the transition to SAGE publications in 2012–2013.
In his editorial for the inaugural issue of JMB, John Moll hoped it would “provide food for intellectual curiosity, scope for rigorous scholarship” by publishing papers on “medical figures felt to be legendary, outstanding or otherwise significant for distinguished or definitive work; and also … on those less well known, but whose lives – or aspects of whose lives – provide material of interest.” 3 We, his successors, hope and believe that those aspirations have been, and continue to be, met by the journal which he founded, and share his view about the its future: “This would seem to be limitless.” 4