50 years of publishing social and preventive medicine and epidemiology and community health.

1 Editorial 50 years of publishing social and preventive medicine and epidemiology and community health Fifty years ago a multidisciplinary group of professionals dedicated to promoting "social medicine" established this Journal with the support of the BM7. For the first four volumes, the British J7ournal of Social Medicine (as it was first called) had on the equivalent of its editorial board two representatives of the Society of Medical Officers of Health, but that explicit societal representation was then replaced by membership in a personal capacity. In volumes 7 and 8 (but not before or after) the disciplines represented by the editorial board were stated in the Journal. They included two from social medicine, one public health, one internal medicine, one obstetrics and gynaecology, one paediatrics and child health, one human genetics, one nutrition, one applied physiology, and one medical statistics-this was in addition to the three editors from the broad field of social medicine. J A Ryle, the first holder of a Chair of Social Medicine in Great Britain and a well known physician, was on the editorial board for the first three years of the Journal before his death. So there was at the beginning a strong influence from senior clini-cians, and a modest input from the professionals who would now be called public health physicians. In volume 9 (1955), for reasons which are not spelt out clearly in the articles published, the name of the Journal was changed to British J'ournal of Preventive and Social Medicine. However, the notice to contributors continued to offer a definition of social medicine as "that branch of science which is concerned with ... human beings living in social aggregates ... Social medicine takes within its province the study of all environmental agencies, living and non-living, relevant to health and efficiency, also fertility and population genetics, norms and ranges ofvariation with respect to individual differences, and investigations directed to the assessment of a regimen of positive health". The words were used without change up to volume 16 (1962). From volume 17 (1963), without a title change to the Journal, the notice to contributors was modified to say that the journal was "primarily concerned with the problems of public health (emphasis added) and their solution. The field of interest includes studies of the distribution and behaviour of disease in human populations ... Preventive and Social Medicine also encompasses the objective study of the organisation …