SIGNING BOOK REVIEWS Available to Purchase

Whether or not it is true that Keats let himself ‘be snuffed out by an article’, the literary notoriety of the attacks on him in Blackwood's Magazine and the Quarterly Review a hundred and thirty years ago has ever since left editors and reviewers with a feeling of discomfort. The critics were anonymous. In some vigorous correspondence in the British Medical Journal two years ago on the question of signing book reviews a medical man once more asked the question ‘who killed John Keats?’ There was for medical men a two‐fold interest in this, because Keats studied medicine for six years, as an apprentice to a surgeon and as a student at Guy's and Thomas's. And the reviews in the two principal weekly medical journals in this country, the British Medical Journal and the Lancet, have always appeared as anonymous contributions. This, too, has long been the custom of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the principal weekly medical periodical in the United States. Last year, in the British Medical Journal, we broke the custom and the names of reviewers now appear at the foot of the notices they write.