The American Journal of the Medical Sciences is an
American general
medical journal.
History
The journal was founded in 1820 as the
Philadelphia Journal of the Medical and Physical Sciences by
Nathaniel Chapman. A new series was started in 1825 under the editorship of Chapman along with
William Potts Dewees and
John D. Godman. In 1827 the editorship passed to
Isaac Hays, who gave it its present name,
and helped make it one of the most important American medical journals of the 19th century.
In 1984, the
Southern Society for Clinical Investigation became the journal's sponsor. Editor-in-chief
Manuel Martinez-Maldonado is vice-chair of the Department of Medicine at
Emory University, as well as a past president of SSCI.
In 1994, 21 percent of submissions came from outside the United States.
On the 175th anniversary, the February 1, 1995 issue featured a photograph of Volume 1 from 1820, a brief history and three classic articles were critiqued by contemporary scholars:
- Leo Buerger "Thrombo-angiitis Obliterans: A Study of the Vascular Lesions Leading to Presenile Spontaneous Gan-grene," 136 (1908); critiqued by David A. Cutler and Marschall S. Runge of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston
- E. Libman and H. L. Celler's "The Etiology of Subacute Infectious Endocarditis," - critiqued by Edward Hook Jr., of the University of Virginia
- Norman M. Keith, Henry P. Wagener and Nelson W Barker's "Some Different Types of Essential Hypertension and the Cause and Prognosis," critiqued by Harriet Dustan of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Regarding these critiques, Martinez-Maldonado said:
Modern journal
The
American Journal of the Medical Sciences is currently published monthly by
Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. The 2006
impact factor was 1.355, with a rank of 41st of 103 medical journals. As of 2007, the Editor-in-Chief is
David W. Ploth (
Charleston,
South Carolina, USA).
Notable contributors, notable articles
- Henry Jacob Bigelow. "Dr. Harlow's case of Recovery from the passage of an Iron Bar through the Head." 20:13-22 (1850). This was only the second significant article published on Phineas Gage and his 1848 accident, but the first to create significant awareness of the case, thanks to the American Journal's prominence. (The first article on Gage, by Dr. John Martyn Harlow himself, had appeared in 1848 in the Boston Medical & Surgical Journal, at the time arguably a less visible publication—though it is now the New England Journal of Medicine.)
