– by Wood Institute travel grantee Jennifer J. Connor, PhD*
A journal has demands that never cease – a perpetual machine, it requires constant attention and lubrication. The metaphor of a machine seems obvious to me – applicable to any small scholarly journal that I have edited, even with the advent of online access – so I was fascinated that early medical journals adopted a ‘life cycle metaphor’ to personify journals as organisms that lived from birth to death. Here, the exhaustion of their “parent-surrogate” editors was seen as the main reason that journals ceased to exist.[1] I decided to expand my historical research on medical print culture in North America, and the centrality of Philadelphia[2], to learn more about medical editors and the professionalization of that role.