IDENTAL EDITOR “I initially argued the BMA should go to a neutral stance


but I now think it ought to be a decision for society. If that was the case, I think society would probably vote for it.” The BMA, on the other hand, is firmly against, though it has respected the journal’s independence on this issue. The decision to start talking about climate change as being a result of human activity and a risk to human health also provoked a considerable backlash. “A lot of it was, you’re naive and stupid to think it’s real – and even if it is real, what’s this got to do with medicine? That seems extraordinary now but that was the initial response. I think it is a bit of a no-brainer now but it gets back to the question, what is the BMJ? What is a medical journal there for?” These “skirmishes”, as she calls them, are all part of the


job, in other words. It is a question, she says, of “behaving well and reasonably” when putting your case. In this way the skirmishes are resolved and you move on.


FEW REGRETS Another key challenge of the job, of course, is keeping your readership happy. On this score, with a global circulation of 122,000 for the print edition and 2.5 million hits every month on the website, her approach is clearly paying off. There have been accolades from her peers, too, and


in 2014 Godlee was named Editor of the Year at the Professional Publishers Association awards and the following year the BMJ was named Magazine of the Year. So, despite all her success as a publisher, has she ever


“Readers of the BMJ want a pleasure read rather than a necessary work read…they also want credibility and care and accuracy”


wished she had gone back across that bridge into medical practice? She was, after all, breaking with a firm family tradition: her father was an oncologist and all three of her siblings are GPs. Further back, her medical pedigree includes a great-great uncle who was none other than Joseph Lister, pioneer of antiseptic surgery. “I did feel quite nostalgic at one point, when my


children were young. I was living up in Lincolnshire and commuting into London and I used to think, ‘Gosh what would a local life be like? Could I retrain as a GP?’ There’s something magical about the interaction with patients and I also love the community of working in a hospital, the social scene – and moving into an editorial office is a rather smaller environment.” But no, she confesses, the regrets have been few. After all, she is positioned at the very centre of the worldwide medical debate. She puts it succinctly, as she remembers that first move: “Medicine had been a vocation for me – and the BMJ, well, I wasn’t going into just any old publishing.”


Adam Campbell is a freelance writer in Edinburgh and a regular contributor to MDDUS publications


MDDUS INSIGHT / 11


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