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To the Editor.—It is astonishing to me that the Board of Trustees of the American Medical Association would vote to do away with the automatic subscription to a specialty journal. The various Archives have allowed each member to concentrate on his special interest, and the JAMA has represented medicine in general. To publish a new journal, PRISM, despite the losses incurred by the specialty journals, makes little sense in the face of the additional half-million dollars outlay that it entails. Better to improve what we have.
If PRISM is to be a throw-away, it may attract advertisements, in which case the question comes up: for whom is PRISM published? Is advertisement so important that medicine can afford to neglect its scientific approach, represented by the Archive journals, in order to enter the possibly more profitable field of social medicine? Social science has a valuable paramedical role, but this is