3The British Medical Journal

bmj.com/archive

The first issue of the British Medical Journal ( BMJ) appeared in October 1840, a 16-page publication which went by the original title of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal. Today, with the BMJ still going strong, you can explore its archive online. It’s free and a potential gold mine. You may find papers or letters written by your medical ancestors, plus the BMJ carries very useful obituaries. However, optical character recognition sometimes struggles with the early issues, so make sure you use wildcards and test variant spellings when searching.