IT COULD prove to be the hypochondriac’s dream. The world’s oldest medical journal is going online next week, with its 180-year backlist of all the 340,000 articles that it has carried in a searchable archive.

Louis Pasteur was only one week old when The Lancet first appeared in 1823, and for years it was the only serious medical journal published anywhere.

Since its foundation Thomas Wakley’s reformist weekly journal has published groundbreaking medical research such as its account of the first blood transfusion in 1829; the exposition of Joseph Lister’s antiseptic principle in 1867; a suitably shocked and awed description of a post-mortem examination on a Jack the Ripper victim in 1888; W. H. Rivers’s insights into First World War shell shock therapy; Howard Florey’s announcement on the proven value of purified penicillin in 1940 as it entered mass production; and, most recently, the identification of coronavirus as a possible cause of Sars.

Next week the title’s present proprietor, Elsevier, will announce the publication of The Lancet’s backfiles on its ScienceDirect website. All the articles have been electronically scanned into the digital archive, and abstracts and summaries are fully searchable, so that subscribers may type in their symptoms or their diagnosed complaint, and read all about it onscreen.

The cost of subscribing to the service has not yet been announced.

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