Peter Deadman

(Visit The Journal of Chinese Medicine website)

I qualified as an acupuncturist in 1978 afer a three your course in the UK, and as I had relatively few patients to start with I wondered what to do with my spare time. Back then there was hardly any material in English on acupuncture, though that is hard to believe now. There were really only a few simple textbooks, for example Felix Mann's and The Essentials of Chinese Acupuncture, which had just been published. There was virtually no study material for anyone who who wanted to develop their understanding of Chinese medicine.

So a journal seemed a good idea. The first few issues were hand typed and had a circulation of barely 100 readers, and articles covered the most basic aspects of Chinese medicine theory.

I kept on doggedly producing the journal though, experimenting with the latest technologies. The first electric typewriter with a one line digital screen was an exciting development, later followed by the first computer and eventually one of the first scanners on the market.

The years passed, the number of subscribers slowly increased, the articles covered more subjects (herbal medicine for example), and in the way life has, we are now working on the 88th issue and the journal is coming up to its 30th anniversary.