The New England Journal of Medicine - 200th Anniversary in 2012

200th Anniversary in 2012

Notable articles from the course of the New England Journal of Medicine's history include:

• In November 1846, Henry Jacob Bigelow, a Boston surgeon, reported a breakthrough in the search for surgical anesthetics with the first uses of inhaled ether in 1846. This allowed patients to remain sedated during operations ranging from dental extraction to amputation. "A patient has been rendered completely insensible during an amputation of the thigh, regain consciousness after a short interval," Bigelow wrote. "Other severe operations have been performed without the knowledge of the patients."

• In June 1906, James Homer Wright published an article that described how he stained and studied bone marrow with descriptions of what are now known as megakaryocytes and platelets.

• In October 1872, a lecture by C.E. Brown-Sequard was published that proposed the then-revolutionary idea that one cerebral hemisphere can influence both sides of the body. The neurologist would go on to describe what is now known as the Brown-Sequard syndrome.

• In June 1948, Sidney Farber reported promising results in treatment of early childhood leukemia. Based on anecdotal evidence that children with acute leukemia worsened if they were given folic acid, he worked on blocking folic acid metabolism. His team gave 16 infants and children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia a folic acid inhibitor, aminopterin -– 10 showed improvement by clinical and hematologic parameters after three months. In his article, Farber advised receiving the results cautiously: "It is again emphasized that these remissions are temporary in character and that the substance is toxic and may be productive of even greater disturbances than have been encountered so far in our studies," he wrote. "No evidence has been mentioned in this report that would justify the suggestion of the term 'cure' of acute leukemia in children."

• In November 1952, cardiologist Paul Zoll published an early report on resuscitation of the heart. "The purpose of this report is to describe the successful use in 2 patients of a quick, simple, effective and safe method of arousing the heart from ventricular standstill by an artificial, external, electric pacemaker," he wrote. "For the first time it was possible to keep a patient alive during ventricular asystole lasting for hours to days. This procedure may prove valuable in many clinical situations."

• In February 1973, NEJM published the first report of polyp removal using a colonoscope and introduced a procedure during screening to reduce cancer risk. The authors reported on 218 patients, from whom they removed 303 polyps (at one or more procedures per patient).

• In December 1981, two landmark articles described the clinical course of four patients -– first reported in the CDC's June 1981 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report—with the disease that would come to be known as AIDS.

• In April 2001, Druker et al. reported a targeted therapy for chronic myelogenous leukemia. Based on the knowledge that BCR-ABL, a constitutively activated tyrosine kinase, causes CML, the authors tested with success an inhibitor of this tyrosine kinase in patients who had failed first-line therapy. The finding helped begin the era of designing cancer drugs to target specific molecular abnormalities.