A Farewell to Arms

 

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In 1979 Henry Stratton, a prominent medical publisher, asked me to create a new journal for his company, Stratton Intercontinental Medical Books, which he had launched 5 years earlier as a successor to his more famous venture, Grune & Stratton. He was looking for a hematology journal, specifically, one that would cover the field of coagulation. Stratton was accompanied that day by his long-time friend, Hans Popper, who—as Dean of the fledgling Mount Sinai School of Medicine—had 2 years earlier recruited me from my post as Chief of the Section on Liver Disease at NIH to Mount Sinai as Chief of Hematology, a position in which I succeeded Louis Wasserman, a giant in the field. A key element in that unexpected recruitment had been a second title, as Chief of the Hepatic Research Group, a nonexistent entity the future creation of which was being dangled in front of me as an incentive in view of my growing interest in the liver.

I declined Stratton's offer, explaining that my love for hematology did not extend to the effort of creating a new journal at that point in my career. We nonetheless parted cordially.

Popper was on the phone the next morning. Stratton, he said, had business reasons for starting new journals under the imprimatur of Stratton Intercontinental. Surely, he insisted, there was some publishing project that would interest someone like me, with my vast editorial experience. I reminded Hans that that experience was, in fact, limited rather than vast, consisting of 1 year (1954–1955) as Editor-in-Chief of the Stuyvesant High School newspaper, the Spectator, and 2 years (1957–1959) in a similar post with the Swarthmore College newspaper, the Phoenix. Neither publication had ever been at risk of winning a Pulitzer Prize. Popper nevertheless persisted, and promised to call back the next day for my “positive answer.” He was my Dean and my friend, but he was also well known never to take “No” for an answer.

Accordingly, having seriously considered the possibilities overnight, I told Hans the next day that I just might be interested in creating a Seminars in Liver Disease journal. It would be based on the model of quarterly focused issues, each containing 8 to 10 related review articles about an important aspect of the field, a model which Grune and Stratton had already successfully pioneered in other disciplines. The idea of a liver journal or journals was already percolating through the hepatic community, but there was considerable angst about the ability to create a readership base that would support such a venture. Stratton had serious reservations. As I recall, it took even Hans Popper a few days to sign on, but once he had decided, Popper became the unstoppable force. I was soon authorized on their joint behalf to come up with a potential list of guest editors, topics, and authors for the first year's issues.

As I began to call around to friends and colleagues, the responses were astonishingly enthusiastic. It was quickly agreed that the first issue would appear during the first quarter of 1981. The topic would be Hepatitis B, and Harvey Alter would be the Guest Editor. Subsequent topic issues and Guest Editors in 1981 would be Drug Induced Liver Disease (H. J. Zimmerman), Alcoholic Liver Injury (C. Lieber), and Primary Biliary Cirrhosis (E. A. Jones). As word got around, I was saved a lot of phone calls by distinguished hepatologists around the globe who called me to volunteer their services as future guest editors. Very quickly the line-ups for years 2 through 5 fell into place, and included Kunio Okuda, Rudi Schmid, Sheila Sherlock, Harvey Sharp, Allan Wolkoff, Tom Chalmers, Josef Fischer, Rudi Preisig, Michael Gerber, Mike Kew, Laurie Powell, Arie Zuckerman, David Van Thiel, Hans Popper, Fenton Schaffner, and Tom Starzl. As we were well into the process of creating Seminars, we learned that another group was actively involved in the creation of what has become the premier journal for original research in liver disease, Hepatology. They, too, had concerns about the viability of a journal devoted primarily to the liver, but their concerns proved to be as unfounded as ours. The first issue of Hepatology, labeled January/February 1981 on the cover, and Seminars in Liver Disease, labeled February 1981, appeared in the same month 35 years ago.

More than three decades have passed, and Seminars in Liver Disease is entering its 36^th year of publication. I have been its Editor through most of those years, except for a 5-year “sabbatical” from 1991–1996 when Marcus Rothschild filled in for me so that I could serve as Editor of Hepatology. By the end of this year, Seminars will have published 144 regular issues, assembled and produced by 144 guest editors or teams of guest editors, and several special supplements. Over these 36 years and 144 issues, only 11 (7.6%) of those invited to edit an issue have declined. Creating and editing an issue and bringing it into print are not small tasks. The enthusiasm with which invited guest editors have accepted and performed this responsibility speak volumes about the value that leaders in our field assign to the journal. Nevertheless, not everything is perfect. There are, for example, topics important enough to merit an issue, but not broad enough “on the bench” to provide the 8 to 10 top-quality articles needed to complete an entire issue. In addition, there has recently been repetitiveness to the topics on which we base our issues.