Abstract
A brief account of the journal from 1961 to 1991.
Keywords::
When I arrived at Auburn University School of Pharmacy in 1981 to take up what later turned out to be a temporary teaching position, I met emeritus professor of pharmacognosy George Macdonald Hocking, who occupied the next office. Actually, he occupied the next office, a room in the back, part of the mechanical chase behind the wall, and a large sit-down laboratory in the old pharmacy building next door. Books and journals were piled everywhere on shelves and desks and in corners, a fact which annoyed the dean, who requested that I help organize the chaos, which turned out to contain much of value. George had retired from teaching in 1976, but was still quite active in writing and editing. He was working on a much expanded second edition of his 1955 opus, “A Dictionary of Terms in Pharmacognosy,” which eventually was published in 1997 as “A Dictionary of Natural Products.” And, he was editing a small journal entitled the “Quarterly Journal of Crude Drug Research”.
The journal was started by an importer of crude drugs, E.F. Steimetz, who edited and published it from Amsterdam. When he died in 1972, his estate sold the journal to the Dutch publisher Swets & Zeitlinger, which was best known for their journal subscription services to libraries. The new publisher enlisted Dr. Hocking as editor, and the journal resumed publication with volume 13 in August of 1974, completing the volume by the end of 1975. A total of 14 articles and several book reviews were published. The research articles included ethnobotany, classical microscopic pharmacognosy, biological activity, and a couple of chemically oriented papers. An editorial board was constituted with scientists from 12 countries. By the time I arrived six years later, the flow of manuscripts had increased, and George, who was trained in classical microscopic analysis and botany, knew he needed a hand with the review of chemical papers. I was duly drafted as a frequent and convenient referee, and in early 1982 appeared on the masthead as a member of the editorial board.
I left Auburn in 1983, landing in Frederick, MD at the National Cancer Institute in the spring of 1984 after a short but productive postdoctoral fellowship with Sam Enna in Houston, Texas. George continued to ask for my help, and over the next two years I was promoted from Assistant Editor to Associate Editor, to Co-Editor-in-Chief in June of 1986. I set about to establish a more systematic network of referees, and as part of that, recruited my friends, collaborators and faithful referees Michael Tempesta and John Pezzuto to the editorial board. Later, in 1989, they would become associate editors for chemistry and pharmacology, respectively, and took over a lot of the burden of arranging for manuscript reviews. Arnold Krochmal, who had long been an editorial board member, was also recruited as an associate editor for botany in 1990.
To better reflect the international scope of the journal, in 1985 the title was changed to the International Journal of Crude Drug Research. Changing the title of a periodical drives librarians mad; nonetheless, in 1991, we changed the name again, to International Journal of Pharmacognosy. A proposal to name it Folk Medicine was roundly rejected by the editorial board at that time. These were the days when journals were edited entirely by hand, and all correspondence went through the mail.
Since many of the authors were located in distant lands, notably India, it often took weeks for editorial cycles to be completed. Furthermore, with a specified number of pages per volume, accepted manuscripts backed up and were not published for a year or more. Since the publisher was in the Netherlands, they used a Dutch printer, whose typesetting of English required constant re-checking. Occasionally whole manuscripts would vanish un-noticed until the authors complained. The publisher, Klaus Plasterk, was a very courteous and energetic partner, however, and the issues of the journal would eventually appear in print. He also arranged for additional pages that temporarily abated the backlog. George was also in constant communication through letters.
In 1991, I had taken a new job within the NCI which required my full attention, and thus I tendered my resignation as editor. George Hocking, who was 83 years old at that time, also stepped down, and John Pezzuto was gracious enough to accept the editorship. I became book review editor for several years thereafter.