Life at The Lancet: a collection of memories

When I joined The Lancet there were only five full-time editorial staff and two part-timers—a retired South African surgeon and me. In the building's entrance hall a bust of The Lancet's radical founder, Thomas Wakley, gazed down from a pedestal, forever reminding us of his fiery determination to end corruption and incompetence in the medical profession, raise standards of care in hospitals, and promote social reform. A gentlemanly distance was maintained, I recall, when the Editor, just as a courtesy, warned that an upcoming editorial might anger subscribers. [...]defects were to be expected in an 18th century building, the bowels of which extended well below street level and stretched, so rumour or wishful thinking had it, to the cellars of a wine importer.