On Sunday, 2nd October, 1823, the first number of a journal that was to cause a great revolution in medical literature, and to affect in no slight degree the whole medical profession, was issued from a small publishing shop in the Strand. The journal was, of course, the _Lancet_, and the publisher young Thomas Wakley. Wakley had walked the united hospitals of Guy’s and St. Thomas’s, and had taken his degree in 1817. He does not appear to have practised regularly till, about 1822, he took a small shop in the Strand, and with the assistance, in a pecuniary point of view, of Collard (now the senior partner of the famous piano factory) determined to start a thoroughly independent medical journal. The first number contained a report of a lecture by Sir A. Cooper, printed from memory. The professors and hospital officers fired up, and for long Wakley had to encounter the same difficulties and almost the same penalties which Cave had previously undergone in commencing his reports of Parliamentary proceedings. As a former student, Wakley attended the lectures, and, like other students, was seen to take occasional notes. Cooper could not, however, bring the charge home till he hit upon the device of calling at midnight at his lodgings, and asking to see the “doctor” upon urgent medical business, when he surprised him red-handed correcting a proof-sheet of a lecture. The discovery was so sudden and so undeniable that neither could refrain from laughter; and eventually Cooper, not ill-humouredly, offered to allow his lectures to appear if the proofs were first sent him for revision. Consequently, Cooper, though often criticised in the _Lancet_, never received a nickname, as did most of the other medical celebrities of the day. For instance, Brodie was known as the “little eminent;” Earle, the “cock sparrow;” Mayo, the “owl;” and Halford, the “eel-backed.”