Gang of four: when BMJ editors met

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Clockwise from left: Richard Smith, Kamran Abbasi, Fiona Godlee, Stephen Lock. Credit: Richard H Smith

Seventeen editors in chief have led The BMJ since the journal was first published on 3 October 1840. The inaugural editorship was a joint one between Peter Hennis Green and Robert Streeten. In the first article of what was then known as the Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal and would become the British Medical Journal in 1857,1 Green and Streeten promised “the contemplation of those great questions of medical reform which are now engaging the attention of medical practitioners. In the consideration of these we shall at once take the highest ground—that of public utility.”2

The four editors in chief who span the past 50 years were, somewhat pleasingly, alive and well enough to meet earlier this year. We at once set about contemplating the great questions of medical reform. We found it easy, perhaps too easy, to take the highest ground. Our gang of four was Stephen Lock, who introduced the famous “hanging committee” and statistical review, Richard Smith, who launched bmj.com, Fiona Godlee, the first woman to be editor in chief, and me, the first of South Asian origin, each one of us building on the triumphs and failures of our predecessors, striving to live up to the lofty ambitions of 1840, and fully mindful that we would be nothing without our readers, authors, peer reviewers, colleagues, supporters, and enemies. It was a happy occasion.