When was the earliest journal club?

The earliest references to journal clubs are in the memoirs and letters of Sir James Paget, a British surgeon, who described a group at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London in the mid-1800s as “a kind of club … a small room over a baker’s shop near the Hospital-gate where we could sit and read the journals.”

Sir William Osler established the first formal medical journal club at McGill University in Montreal in 1875. The original purpose of Osler’s journal club was “for the purchase and distribution of periodicals to which he could ill afford to subscribe” (see the excerpts from Google Books below).

References:
Journal clubs as a trigger for ’socializing’. The Search Principle blog.



Comments from Google Buzz:

Laika Spoetnik - Besides the point, but I have good memories of St Bartolomews. Here I learned direct sequencing and did part of my experiments. Very old building btw.

Aidan Finley - the father of Stephen Paget of "seed and soil" hypothesis.

Related reading:

Virtual Journal Club for Hospital Medicine by the Washington University in St. Louis