Revista Medica de Chile and medical education

With this issue, Revista Medica de Chile will have been published uninterruptedly, for 130 years. Formal medical education had an early development since in 1833 by the Irish physician William C Blest. The Santiago Medical Society was founded in Schneider. Revista Medica is the oldest seerial publication in South America and the second oldest in the Spanish speaking world. This is a remarkable fact for a comparatively young country. With the creation of the Medical Society and Revista Medica, a process of continuous medical education was started and they became a real Graduate School. The journa has adopted the main changes in the knowdedge and technology. Some important milestones of its development, during the second half of the 20th century, were the definition of its objectives and structure, the incorporation of peer review of manuscripts (even with foreign revewers) the adoption of international guidelines for publication, its incorporation into the main biomedical journal indexes, the modernization of its printing process, the making of a computer generated index of all papers published since 1872, its incorporation into a digital Medical Journal Editors. The success of the journal is influenced by the independence that the Medical Society has conferred to the editors (all outstanding University Professors), as well as to the characteristics of an educational campus "invisible and without tumult" (Ingelfinger) (Rev. Med Chile 2002; 130: 719-22).