A Wealth of Medical Literature from the PJS Centennial Edition 1906-2006

Abstract

Out of more than 4,000 articles in 134 volumes of the Philippine Journal of Science (PJS) Centennial Edition (1906-2006), 11 volumes published during the pre-war period were dedicated to medical sciences, containing more than 300 articles on various medical topics. A one-time 30-minute various keywords searches in the subject and title categories of the STII-DOST OPAC (Analytics) on 24 January 2008 yielded more than 600 resulting articles. The results proved a wealth of medical literature in PJS, however small (only 0.15 percent of the total number of articles covered), not so much in terms of quantity but in terms of historical insights into the practice of medicine in the country during the American colonial period.

Introduction

This study was made to assess the quantity and quality of medical literature contained in the Philippine Journal of Science (PJS) Centennial Edition, for the purpose of advising medical students who may want to do research regarding the practice of medicine in the Philippines during the American colonial period.

The PJS was first published by the Bureau of Science in 1906. Its first editor was Dr. Paul Freer, a professor of Chemistry in the University of Michigan before he came to the Philippines to serve as Director of the Bureau of Government Laboratories in 1902, which became the Bureau of Science in 1905. As soon as the Bureau of Government Laboratories was in place, a small library was immediately established.

It is amazing to note that today, there is this scholarly belief that the library is the most appropriate publisher of research journals. We know this is a sound fundamental belief because the PJS was conceived, born, and nurtured in the library of the Bureau of Science. At present, the PJS is being published by the Science and Technology Information Institute, which serves as the central library for the entire DOST System. PJS is one of the six Philippine journals cited by ISI now known as Thomson Scientific. As we know, the Thomson Scientific, based in the US, is looked up to as the leader in the international standard of excellence for scholarly journals of all disciplines.

When we talk about journals, we cannot help but think about Open Access. Open Access is free, immediate, permanent, full-text, online access, for any user, Web-wide, to digital scientific and scholarly material, primarily research articles published in peer-reviewed journals. An open-access article has limited copyright and licensing restrictions which means-- anyone, anywhere, with access to the Internet may read, download, copy, and distribute that article.

The first major international statement on open access was the Budapest Open Access Initiative in February 2002. Open Access is very much a trend of the 21st century information world. Countries who are supportive of Open Access are the US, UK, Canada, Brazil, India, and Japan. We are aware of the HighWire Press, a division of the Stanford University Libraries, hosting the largest repository of high impact, peer-reviewed content, with more than a thousand journals and more than four million full text articles from over a hundred scholarly publishers. HighWire-hosted publishers have collectively made more than 1.8 million articles free. With its partner publishers, HighWire Press produces 71 of the 200 most-frequently-cited journals.

Other excellent sources of Open Access journal collections are the PubMed Central, BioMed Central, PLoS (Public Library of Science), SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online)

There is also the Open Journal System of the Public Knowledge Project in which the Stanford University is also involved together with the Simon Fraser University in Canada which aims to expand and improve access to research.

Is the Philippine Journal of Science in the Open Access? It should be. The volumes published from 1906 up to 1922 are technically in the public domain and thus open for use by the public for free; free for research and educational purposes only but not for commercial profit. The Philippines is a signatory to the Berne Convention of August 1951 in Paris. No signatory in the Berne Convention ever hold a copyright in perpetuity. Works published before 1923 or those 95 years before the current year are considered in the public domain. The first Berne Convention was held in Paris in 1896 and then there were succeeding meetings to amend the provisions. It is expected that the PJS editorial board will soon come up with a formal instruction to make the earlier volumes of PJS available to Open Access through the STII-DOST OPAC. In the meantime, those earlier volumes of PJS can be accessed by the public from the online archive of the University of Michigan Library.

The Open Journal System of the Public Knowledge Project based in Canada advocates that libraries are the appropriate publishers of scholarly journals.

It can be stated that the STII which is home to the central library of the DOST System, is indeed the appropriate publisher of the PJS; and eventually when it has established its capacity to handle electronic / Web publishing— of all other scholarly journals in the DOST System.

Even with a selected open access policy, the STII Library can still make significant contributions to research and the knowledge-driven economy, if it publishes all the DOST journals and indexes the same towards making them available via federated searching in the envisioned ASEAN Portal. Such nurtures the high impact factor (high frequency citation) of journals; as well as filter down the benefits of science to the grassroots because scholarly research results are made available to every child, woman, and man who has access to Internet. Every child, woman, and man may not always have a need for scholarly information but it is always there whenever they need it. People may wish to read the scholarly literature on medicine when members of their families or they themselves are sick. We hope there will come a time when people will also read PJS each time they need to know more about tropical medicine.

Medical Literature in PJS

Methodology
This was how I conducted the study of the medical literature in the PJS centennial edition. First, I browsed through the printed PJS Centennial Index and discovered 319 medical articles and some 40 medical topics. I listed the topics and then used them as keywords in my online search at the STII-DOST OPAC Analytics. I would like to clarify here that I did the online search as an account holder of the system module. I still have to try doing the search as an outside researcher and find out if the same results will be obtained in such a short time as 30 minutes. Then I tabulated the results (as can be seen in Fig. 1). Of course, I have to go back to the OPAC later to download selected full texts to be able to read the contents.

More than 600 articles resulted by typing 40 keywords in the search field of the STII-DOST OPAC. The most number of results, yielding 289 articles, were the keywords search “Medical science,” followed by 41 articles from the keyword search “Leprosy,” 30 articles each from the keywords search “Medicinal plants” and “Yaws;” and 27 articles each from the keywords search “Malaria” and “Cholera.” Some 23 articles resulted from the keyword search “Virus.” More than ten articles resulted from the search using the keywords “Dysentery,” “Syphilis,” “Vaccine,” “Toxicity,” and “Tuberculosis.”

It was good that the printed PJS Index had an author index wherein the search for Eduardo Quisumbing, the expert on medicinal plants, yielded 11 articles; and the search for Honoria Acosta-Sison, the first Filipina doctor, mother of Philippine obstetrics resulted into one article. Author search is not available yet in the STII-DOST OPAC.

It is also worth citing here the first article authored by a Filipino, “Obstetrics in the Philippine Islands,” by Dr. Fernando Calderon, published by the PJS in 1908. Dr. Calderon was one of the leading Filipino obstetricians during the American colonial period and the first director of the Philippine General Hospital. He read that same paper in the 5th Annual Meeting of the Philippine Islands Medical Association in Manila on 29 February 1908.

The medical literature in the PJS Centennial Edition comprised only .15 percent of the total number of articles, but we consider it already a wealth of information, much valued for the historical insight it offers into the practice of medicine in the country during the American colonial period.

Medical Science (289 Articles)
There were 289 articles under the subject “Medical Science.” One of the more interesting articles was about Albinism in the Philippines written by Heiser & Villafranca in 1913. We are familiar with Albinos as those people with red or yellow hair and white to reddish or yellowish complexion. They are commonly called “Anak Araw” in Tagalog. The Philippines, South America, and other places where dark complexion dominates produce more cases of Albinism than other regions. Albinism is a disease due to faulty development of pigment-producing mechanism in the body. It is neuropathic in origin, resulting from defects in the nervous constitution of the ancestors.

It is good to know the scientific background of Albinism specially to educate primitive societies that may still exist in undeveloped countries that regard Albinos as omens of evil. In 1913, Albinos are being killed in Africa. In the Visayan region of the Philippines at that time, Albinos are neither hated nor admired. They were just regarded as people who had incurred the displeasure of the spirit. From this research of Villafranca & Heiser, one learns that Albinism is also found in vegetables and lower animals such as carabaos, pigs, and rats.

Medicinal Plants (30 Articles)
There were 30 articles under the subject “Medicinal Plants.” There were articles by Masilungan and others about the anti microbial activity of extracts from Acacia leaves in 1958; anti tuberculosis in 1959; and anti cancer in 1964. Villasenor and others did a study in 1998 about the anti diabetis plants namely Banana flowers, Tanglad leaves, Kamote leaves, Macopa leaves, Mango leaves, and Ampalaya.

Leprosy (41 Articles)
There were 41 articles under the subject “Leprosy,” regarding the Kahn test, blood chemistry studies, bacteriology of leprosy, serology of leprosy, etiology of leprosy, as well as drugs and treatment for leprosy.

Yaws (30 Articles)
There were 30 articles under the subject “Yaws.” Yaws is a tropical infection of skin, bones, and joints caused by the spiral shaped bacteria Spirochete. One of the interesting articles was “The Histology of Healing Yaws” written in 1923 by Ernest Goodpasture of the U.P. College of Medicine.

Malaria (27 Articles)
There were 27 articles under the subject “Malaria,” regarding observations upon Malaria (1906); incidence and complications of Malaria in the Philippines (1910); a new Philippine Malaria mosquito (1914); and notes on Malaria transmission (1928).

Cholera (27 Articles)
There were 27 articles under the subject “Cholera,” among the more significant of which were five, namely —
(1) Some Considerations with Regard to the Cause of the Frequent Reappearance of
Cholera in the Philippine Islands, with Statistics Beginning 1902 to 1908
(2) Histopathology of the Intestine in Cholera
(3) Bacteriological Investigation of Faeces and Bile of Cholera Cases and Cholera
Carriers
(4) A Poisonous Constituent in Cholera Stools
(5) The Treatment of Cholera by Injection of Hypertonic Saline Solutions with a Simple
and Rapid Method of Intra-Abdominal Administration

Virus (23 Articles)
There were 23 articles about the subject “Virus.” The article of St. John and others which discussed how it was possible to transmit the virus of dengue from an infected to a normal Aedes aegypti mosquitoes without passage through a vertebrate host was significant, and may have led to a more complete knowledge of the life history of the virus.

Dysentery (19 Articles)
There were 19 articles about the subject, “Dysentery,” among them about infantile dysentery written in 1908 by Bowman; and dysentery carriers in 1925 by Ana Velasquez-Colet of the Bureau of Science.

Vaccine (16 Articles)
There were 16 articles under the subject “Vaccine,” among them, an article about cobra anti-venum serum production at the Alabang Serum and Vaccine Laboratory in 1956, written by Walfrido & Salafranca. Perhaps this same laboratory was the forerunner of the present RITM or Research Institute for Tropical Medicine located also in Alabang.

Toxicity (15 Articles)
There were 15 articles under the subject “Toxicity.” In 1992, Erlina Kua and Fabian Dayrit did a study on the environmental impact of detergents, particularly the toxicity of Alkylbenzene Sulfonates (ABS) and coconut fatty alcohol sulfates towards fish and rat.

Tuberculosis (14 Articles)
There were 14 articles under the subject “Tuberculosis” regarding its clinical epidemiology, profiles of patient, study of a thousand TB cases, and treatment.

Syphilis (14 Articles)
There were 13 articles under the subject “Syphilis” regarding serologic studies, Wasserman and Kahn tests, immunology, and treatment with Neosalvarsan which became available in 1912 with high-risk side effects. Penicillin replaced Neosalvarsan as treatment for Syphilis in the 1940s.


Conclusion
Despite the fact that out of the more than 4,000 articles published by PJS during a hundred-year period, only more than 600 articles (or a mere 0.15 percent)) were about the medical sciences-- it can be said that such were already a significant body of historical knowledge about the practice of tropical medicine during the colonial period in the Philippines. The articles on medicinal plants are as valuable today as they were in those early years.

It can be noted that the very first issue of PJS carried an article about Dengue. A century after, Dengue continues to threaten the civilized world and is one of the most urgent areas in European researches.

Being aware of the medical literature in PJS, librarians are in a better position to offer advise to student-researchers who may want to do a historical study of medical practice in colonial Philippines; or perhaps, discover the valuable articles about Philippine medicinal plants.

To do online searching of PJS, just bring your browser to http://scinet.dost.gov.ph , then click the Online Public Access Catalog, and you are on your way. We hope medical librarians will encourage researchers to explore the wealth of medical literature in PJS. I understand we have given some print and CD copies of the PJS Centennial Index to some of the participants. We hope you will find the PJS Centennial Index useful in your exploration of the wealth of medical literature.

Presented by Cymbeline R. Villamin
at the 20th Medical and Health Librarians Association of the Philippines (MAHLAP) Congress, 28 Feb 2008, Kimberly Hotel, Manila

Acknowledgment

• Lopez, Rosario F. Analytical Study of PJS (Unpublished)
• Nobleza , Carmelita F. Philippine S&T Through the Years. Taguig City: Science and Technology Information Institute, 1992.
• Padolina, William G. (Ed.). One Hundred Years, One Journal Special Centennial Edition Vol. 1. Taguig City: Science and Technology Information Institute, 2008.
• Padolina , William G. (Ed.). Title Index to the Philippine Journal of Science Centennial Edition. Taguig City: Science and Technology Information Institute, 2006.
• STII-DOST Online Public Access Catalog http://scinet.dost.gov.ph/union/index.php