The old case: Thorax in the 1970s

As a young consultant in Cardiff in the 1970s I inherited two things: a battered old brown bakelite case that had been carried by earlier South Wales tuberculosis doctors and the editorship of Thorax. The two fitted well together. The work was shared with the surgical editors, Ben Milstein then Hugoe Matthews, who dealt with thoracic surgery and anatomy, the rest coming to me. The BMJ agreed to buy me an electric typewriter and pay secretarial expenses. Approximately one or two papers arrived each day, to be filed in the brown case. This held about 15, and it was possible to carry a week’s work together with my stethoscope wherever I went; when it was full I knew I had to deal with it. The process was quite simple and conducted by letter. Like my predecessors, I read every paper, decided whether it was of sufficient interest and, if it was, wrote to a referee asking for his or her opinion on the science and giving my personal views, thus immediately introducing a bias. Sometimes, if I didn’t think it at all interesting, I rejected it politely but firmly without asking a referee. Occasionally this attracted some discussion with the authors and once resulted in a death threat (from an …