In the 1800s the literary marketplace was home to a vast constellation of medical periodical literature that catered to the tastes of a wide range of audiences. Weeklies aimed at medical practitioners circulated in tandem with journals that were riding the ebbs and flows of fashions in alternative medicine. Myriad penny publications on health and hygiene competed for the attention and purses of the public, while journals on everything from nursing and first aid to mental science, dermatology and physiology amplified the market. Around 1800 there were perhaps ten or fewer medical journals circulating in Britain and Ireland. By the end of the century there were over a hundred, with periods of rapid growth in the field at the beginning and end of the century (Bynum and Wilson 1992: 30–1). This is not to mention the multitude of generalist titles that relayed medical news and health advice to their readers, often reproduced from the pages of doctors’ journals, and which saw medicine firmly embedded within the mass media by the end of the century. The construction and communication of medical knowledge through print culture involved the whole spectrum of society, and the sheer number of journals either wholly or substantially devoted to matters of medicine and health that were available belies any easy answer as to what constituted the medical press in the nineteenth century. Its meaning was not necessarily stable, as audiences and content altered and adapted to changing medical, social and journalistic currents.

In this chapter, I chronicle the changing face of medical journalism over the course of the century, paying particular attention to three genres: the professional press, journals devoted to non-orthodox medical practices like homeopathy and mesmerism, and medical and health journals which actively sought to include the public in their audience, the latter of which found increasing popularity in the last three decades of the century. These categories are neither neat nor exhaustive; indeed, by examining them together I evince their continuous entanglement with one another. Collectively, they serve as an introductory point to what was an expansive medical press. They show too that as well as promoting professional cohesiveness, medical journals of the nineteenth century were also significant in facilitating laypeople's engagement with and contributions to medical knowledge and politics.