The British Journal of General Practice (BJGP) started life in 1953 as a cyclostyled newsletter called Between Ourselves, sent out by Dr Robin Pinsent, a Birmingham GP who was a founder member of College Council and the leader of the College’s first Research Committee, to a small group of research enthusiasts. The first issue of the Research Newsletter was published in the same year, edited by Dr RMS (Mac) McConaghey, a GP from Dartmouth in Devon.
McConaghey’s statement of the reasons for undertaking research in general practice in primary care, which forms part of his introduction to the Newsletter, can hardly be bettered:
‘There was a time in the history of medicine when all research was general-practitioner research, for there were none but general practitioners to undertake it. ... Jenner recognized the relationship between cowpox and smallpox, and Withering observed the diuretic effect of the foxglove leaf. Then came a change in the pattern of medical practice. Institutional care of serious illness and research in hospital developed on an increasing scale. The quest for more facts in the field of general practice slackened, and family doctors devoted their energies to relaying to patients the new knowledge that their hospital colleagues had gained. The flame of general-practitioner research burned low, to be fanned into occasional brilliance by such men as James Mackenzie and William Pickles. Now, once again it is being realized that opportunities to undertake research into conditions encountered in general practice are unique and wide, and that general practitioners have a duty to work on many problems which might otherwise not receive the attention they deserve.’1
These aspirations reflected the excitement of the early 1950s: the discovery by Francis Crick and James Watson of DNA and the ascent of Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. …