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THE WOMAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, Alice Stewart

Alice Stewart was one of Britain’s foremost epidemiologists. However her recognition came late in her career, having spent her life fighting the establishment’s enshrined views. In the 1950s when she started her work, x-rays were routinely used in foetal monitoring. It was Stewart who first showed the link between the practice and childhood leukemia. She went on to look at the effects of low-level radiation exposure – uncovering the true adverse effects of chronic exposure, and thus earning herself the […]

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THE MAN WHO STOPPED SMOKING, Richard Doll

Richard Doll was a luminary of clinical research whose case control study, published in the BMJ in 1950, first identified smoking as an important cause of cancer and other diseases. He carried his research out on doctors in the UK who smoked, and tracked their mortality over the course of 50 years. The latest paper being published in the BMJ in 2004.

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THE TB TRIALS, John Crofton

John Crofton pioneered the randomised controlled trial in a 1948 BMJ paper which looked at the antibiotic streptomycin to treat TB. Now in his 90s, Dr Crofton talks to Colin Blakemore about the importance of randomisation and blinding, and how it has helped to make medicine more evidence based.

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DEATH BY MOSQUITO, Ross and Manson

For this installment of our series we travel to the tropics to look at the beginning of our understanding of malaria. In 1900 Patrick Manson wrote a seminal paper in the BMJ Experimental Proof of the Mosquitomalaria Theory he worked closely with Ronald Ross, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for medicine for his work on malaria.

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SURGERY TRANSFORMED, Joseph Lister

Joseph Lister published his first paper in the BMJ in 1867 and carried on publishing in the journal for over 40 years, and now all of his articles can be accessed for free online in the BMJ archive. Lister is the father of antiseptic surgery, and his pioneering techniques transformed the survival rates of patients. Until Lister introduced methods to prevent infection, almost 50% of patients who went under the knife would die as a result.

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A NEW WORLD IS BORN, James Simpson

The BMJs online archive now being fully searchable back to 1840. To celebrate this, we have commissioned a series of videos to tell the tale of some of the medical luminaries and world changing articles that have appeared in the BMJ. In this film we talk to medical historians and academics about Sir James Young Simpson, the man who discovered the anaesthetic properties of chloroform, and pioneered its use in surgery. Simpson wrote extensively in the BMJ, and all of […]

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THE STORIES, sampling the series

Colin Blakemore presents the BMJ’s new video series, told in eight parts. These stories delve into the BMJ’s 169 year old archive to unearth some of the leading thinkers of their time, and show the contribution they have made to modern medicine. In this first video, Colin introduces the series and shows a sneak preview of what will follow in the coming weeks. Stories will include the birth of anaesthetic, the discovery of the anopheles mosquito as the vector for […]

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The Issues

Colin Blakemore presents the BMJ’s new video series, told in eight parts. These stories delve into the BMJ’s 169 year old archive to unearth some of the leading thinkers of their time, and show the contribution they have made to modern medicine. In this second video, Colin looks at the issues surrounding medical research with Bad Science author and columnist Ben Goldacre; Iain Chalmers, editor of the James Lind Library; and BMJ deputy editor Tony Delamothe.

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