The Lancet began as a radical sheet that pirated lectures and won every lawsuit
Thomas Wakley, an English surgeon angry at medical corruption, launched The Lancet in 1823 and named it after the scalpel. He printed hospital lectures for free, without permission, was sued repeatedly and won every case. Two centuries later his weekly ranks among the most cited medical journals in the world.
Wakley said his aim was to teach ordinary people about medicine. The lectures he reprinted normally cost £15 to attend, and the copyright and defamation suits that followed only boosted his readership: within two years more than 4,000 people subscribed at sixpence an issue, and within seven the figure passed 8,000. The pamphleteer William Cobbett was among its contributors. Until 1825 the journal also ran celebrity gossip, political news and literary letters, and the Wakley family kept the editorship until 1908.
Its pages carried landmark work. It reported James Blundell's first blood transfusion, Joseph Lister's 1867 account of using antiseptic on abscesses, and in 1915 Charles Samuel's first article on shell shock. Early on it exposed filthy hospital conditions and pushed the government to act, and it has played a notable part in reforming British healthcare.
Its worst moment came from a 1998 paper by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. In February 2004, 10 of the 13 authors disowned that possibility, editor Richard Horton said Wakefield had undeclared conflicts of interest, and the journal withdrew the paper entirely on 2 February 2010, once Wakefield's conduct of the research had been judged unethical.
Hodder & Stoughton bought the journal in 1921 and Elsevier in 1991; Horton has edited it since 1995, with offices in London, New York City and Beijing. He says it devotes more space than rival journals to health problems in low and middle-income countries. It reportedly accepts only 5 percent of submissions, and Journal Citation Reports gave it a 2025 impact factor of 109.0, ranking it above The New England Journal of Medicine in general medicine.
Source: The Lancet
