BMJ archive (1840 - ) online and free

To celebrate the launch of the BMJ archive - digitised under the auspices of the Wellcome Library's Medical Journals Backfiles project - an editorial in today's BMJ offers readers a prize of £1000 for the most interesting use of the archive.

For an introduction to the archive, the BMJ have produced a series of videos, featuring the former head of Britain’s Medical Research Council, Colin Blakemore, that focus on some of the important subjects and people that have appeared in the journal’s pages.

The first of these looks at James Simpson's paper in 1847 , which showed that chloroform was a better form of anesthesia than ether.

Future "From our archive" videos will feature John Snow, David Livingstone, Joseph Lister, Arthur Conan Doyle, Florence Nightingale, William Osler, Richard Doll, Alice Stewart, Amartya Sen, and Joseph Stiglitz.

The full archive is available at bmj.com, PubMed Central and UK PubMed Central.