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"The medical women question is perennial", an anonymous contributor to The Lancet's editorial pages wearily opined in a November issue of 1877. "It knows no limits; we encounter it at every turn...its appeals to periodical literature, instead of awakening a spirit of conciliation, have usually aroused a feeling of resentment." Alison Moulds, of the University of Oxford, who has explored the periodical literature of the time, found that opinion on the medical training of women was far from uniform. One Lancet contributor ventured that women might treat female patients and children, whereas another harrumphed that "women hate one another, often at first sight". Moulds' study of the "medical women question" points to the dangers of leaping to conclusions about past opinions or practices without exploring the historical context.
Medical journals offer an unparalleled source of historical data not only on doctors, diseases, and medical practice, but also on social transformations such as the participation of women in professional life. Working with Nineteenth-Century Medical and Health Periodicals, a recent conference at St Anne's College, Oxford, UK, brought together various examples of the gold that is to be found between the yellowing pages. However, participants also set out the challenges that face prospectors.
Medical periodicals began to circulate in the mid-18th century, and by end of the 19th century some hundreds had been launched. As Thalia Knight, Librarian at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, pointed out, scientific commentators were already worrying about information overload before the century was over. "At the present time, the accumulation of material is so rapid that there is danger of indigestion", lamented physicist Lord Rayleigh in 1877. He added that "it is often forgotten that the rediscovery in the library may be a more difficult and uncertain process than the first discovery in the laboratory".
Modern scholars face no less difficulty making such rediscoveries. Like endangered species, complete sets of 19th-century journals have become isolated in few and widely spaced reserves in Europe and the USA, while in less well-resourced libraries they face the scrapheap. Even when they are protected, they may not be accessible. Sally Shuttleworth heads the historical research projects at the University of Oxford that jointly sponsored the conference, which include the Constructing Scientific Communities project. The...