In his classic essay on ‘Lay Medical Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century: The Evidence of the Gentleman's Magazine’ (1985), Roy Porter cites this striking declaration as indicative of ‘a growing intellectual division of labour amongst both opinion-producers and opinion-consumers, in which medicine was being set aside for specialists’. As such, the review article is seen to represent the nineteenth century revision of the eighteenth-century public sphere – a move away from the ‘notion that men of differing ranks could discourse within it on all subjects on equal terms, through the authenticating token of Enlightenment rationality’. However, within the early nineteenth-century Edinburgh literary marketplace, local commercial factors were also at play: the article was co-authored by Jeffrey and Andrew Duncan, junior, and its appearance shortly after the launching of Duncan's own specialist periodical, the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, in 1805 is most probably not a coincidence. The Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal was also published by Archibald Constable (an advertisement for the new medical journal may be found in the Edinburgh Review of October 1805), and it was not to Constable's or his editors’ advantage for two of his most successful periodical publications to compete with one another.

Medical content in the Edinburgh Review does markedly decline following the 1806 statement, with coverage only extending to medical topics of signifi cant public concern (such as vaccination, malaria, contagious fever, and the treatment of the mentally ill) and also those of particular interest to chemists, physiologists or anatomists. However, the prevalence of medical content and the importance of medical contributors in the early years of the Edinburgh has yet to be fully recognised, and this chapter examines medical discourses and ideologies in the Edinburgh to set up a comparative context for examining the relationship of their primary ideological competitor – Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine – to medical culture. I argue that the reforming and professionalising rhetoric of the Edinburgh emerged, in part, from medico-scientifi c culture and was harnessed by medical contributors and carried forward in Constable's medical journal, which, as David Hamilton notes, had a ‘similar format’ to the Edinburgh Review and ‘a similar authority in medical circles’.