Personal views: The seven ages of my BMJ
Authors: William H Isbister
Journal: BMJ (1998)

The magic of seven was reaffirmed in this journal in 1996 by Professor Ian Stewart (BMJ 1996;313:1570). After reading the editorial I began musing over my own personal relationship with the BMJ. I soon realised that it, too, was a function of seven, there being so far seven phases of the relationship. 

My father was a general practitioner in Old Trafford, and at one time an appreciative old patient had given him an antique desk which had a glass fronted bookcase on top of it. The bookcase had been separated from the desk and placed in our hall. Whenever I saw the bookcase it was piled to overflowing with unopened brown BMJ packages. I remember, too, how difficult it was to open a roll and how even more difficult it was to straighten the journal out in order to read it. Since my father was faced with a busy general practice in those war torn days of nightly air raids the rolls often ended unopened in the waste paper basket when I got my first chance to play with them. 

In 1952 I entered medical school, and it was not long before we were being encouraged to read our own journals and to take out a subscription for at least one of them. In those days there was no studentBMJ, and I declined to have a subscription of my own, thinking that I could easily look at my father’s journals. The contents seemed to be entirely irrelevant to my life as an undergraduate, and as I was studying for my second MB examination I could see no relevance for the journal at all. 

In 1958, to my parents’ delight and without much help from the BMJ, I graduated and became a house surgeon at my teaching hospital. I immediately joined the BMA and began to receive my own unopenable rolls. The difficulty with opening and straightening persisted, and being a keen young hospital doctor immersed in clinical problems, I had little time to examine what seemed to be the esoteric contents of a journal that had little meaning to me. As I came to the end of my preregistration year, the need to find my next job loomed large. I had already determined that I wished to become a surgeon, and so I turned to the surgical section of the classified advertisements in the BMJ for help. 

For the first time I found that the journal actually had some relevance for me. I continued to use it whenever I needed to change position. And when I returned from the United States to find that I was a time expired senior registrar, I turned to the BMJ with even greater vigour. I had, by this time, decided that I wished to pursue a career in academic surgery, although the change from the NHS to academia at this late stage proved to be quite difficult. I had enthusiastically but unsuccessfully attended several interviews for senior lecturer posts and, after an interview in Edinburgh, was taken aside by a senior member of the appointments committee who told me that it would be difficult to change streams in Britain and that I should be prepared to travel to wherever an academic surgical position became available. To my great delight, in my next BMJ I found an Australian university looking for a senior lecturer in surgery, and after a successful interview my wife and our three children set sail. 


In Australia my BMJ was delivered by airmail; it was much easier to unpack, but now it was missing the classified advertisements, something that I missed enormously. In my new position of responsibility I began intermittently to scan the journal, collecting several editions for one session and tearing out those papers concerning medical education and surgery that were of interest to me. During the succeeding 18 years, first as a senior lecturer and then as a professor, I managed without my advertisements and became an intermittent reader. 


“I am reading the journal in a way that might gain editorial approval”



Now close to retirement, for the first time in my life I read the BMJ (still the airmail edition) regularly. I seem to have more time for editorials and news items. I read all the papers relating to my own discipline, although they are rather infrequent, and I scan the rest of the journal and read anything else that seems to take my fancy. I feel that for the first time in my life I am reading the journal in a way that might gain editorial approval. This may be due partly to my own increased experience and slowly acquired wisdom and partly to the fact that I seem to have a little more time. But perhaps the major reason is that the journal has now become not only easier to get out of the wrapping but more relevant and readable than it used to be during my own formative years. 

The penultimate phase of my relationship is an electronic one because now I can access the BMJ on the Internet. The classified advertisements are at last available again but, of course, they are also now of more interest than importance. It is nice to find that I once again have access to the complete journal. 

The final phase of this relationship will be to have a small contribution published in some part of the journal—in the final reckoning it could simply be an obituary. 

My relationship with the journal has clearly evolved, as has my surgical career. It is now more accessible than ever before, and the new format and content are more readable and interesting. The BMJ has played an interesting and changing part in my life in a way that no other journal has, although I have to confess that I have only rarely read it as a journal except in recent years. I hope that with the advent of the studentBMJ the introduction of students and junior doctors to the journal will be more meaningful than my own, and that this will result in an earlier appreciation of its value and importance. From not being able to open the BMJ to enjoying reading it is a major evolution. It is only sad that it has taken so long.