BMJ  2007;335 (22 December), doi:10.1136/bmj.39430.559375.47

Editor's choice

Orthopaedic gorillas no more

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

It seems like only yesterday, but the brief run of less than entirely complimentary Christmas articles about orthopaedic surgeons was over by 1990. Yet some orthopaedic surgeons, like elephants, never forget. One recently set a medical student the task of testing his hypothesis that orthopaedic surgeons had been singled out for especially negative treatment in Christmas issues of the BMJ.

Journal etiquette demands that I can’t tell you what Tracy Sorkin found because we rejected her article. But in her efforts to settle one of the last remaining orthopaedic questions, she generated a wealth of useful information that she has happily shared with us. Her research entailed reviewing the last 20 Christmas BMJs and classifying their articles as either "serious" or "lighthearted" on the basis of their titles. Then she further subdivided the lighthearted articles into 15 categories (figure).

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By the time I read her article, I . . . [Full text of this article]

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