• medical humanities
• emergent themes
• medical education
• research

Where are the people? I am their leader—I ought to follow them.”

So cried Alexandre Ledru-Rollin during the 1848 revolution in France.¹ Now it is a hazardous business for editors to conjecture about the parallels between their steering of a topical academic journal and a radical lawyer’s directing of social uprising, and even the most indulgent and benevolent of our readers may be seriously alarmed at our possible editorial intentions, not to say delusions. So let us give an assurance that having—as we hope—by means of it secured the reader’s undivided attention we will allow (indeed, encourage) the implied parallel to wither. The formal resemblance that interests us concerns, in any case, not editorial megalomania but the role of any journal which—if the position it occupies in its chosen field of inquiry is at all visible and conspicuous—has a responsibility to guide, or at least to illuminate, the path ahead.

The actual leadership involved is primarily exercised of course by the authors of the published papers. As editors we must select those papers; we can even hope to stimulate and encourage their production; but beyond these essentially supporting roles we are in the hands of our readers and our contributing writers. In this sense, and in this sense alone, we are conscious of Ledru-Rollin’s diffident explanation as to why he was heading where he was heading.

This is after all only the seventh issue of Medical Humanities, but already the eclectic nature of its content bespeaks what is becoming an established pattern of eclectic interests among the readership and contributing writers: this journal reflects, we hope faithfully, the wide ranging mosaic of inquiries and perspectives which together constitute the medical humanities as …