Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/380

340 340 BUTTERWORTH AND CHURCHILL. diately adjoining Guy's and St. Thomas's Hospitals, and became the daily resort of the lecturers and numerous students of the schools ; I thus early in life became known to the celebrated men of the day, little anticipating that eventually I should become the publisher of Guy's and St. Thomas's Hospital Reports, and of so large a proportion of the works that issued from the medical press." At the time when young Churchill entered the pro- fession of medical publishing, the periodicals, and, of course, the standard technical works, presented a striking contrast to those at present in existence, for now the medical profession assert, with the greatest truth, that their special organs are of far higher intrinsic worth, and of far better " tone " of thought and expression, than those relating to any other purely technical subject. For years, however, after Churchill became a bookseller's assistant the medical press was only on a par with the papers relating to the other professions, and was chiefly represented by the Medico- CJiirurgical Review, founded by J. Johnson in 1820, and the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, a work we have already come across in our notice of Constable. These reviews contained no original reports, no strictures on the hospital appointments then jobbed, like everything else, to men of wealth, family, and interest. In fact, they consisted of little besides long and elaborate abstracts of new books. On Sunday, 2nd October, 1823, the first number of a journal that was to cause a great revolution in medical literature, and to affect in no slight degree the whole medical profession, was issued from a small publishing shop in the Strand. The journal was, of course, the Lancet, and the publisher young Thomas