Night visiting in general practice

Abstract

pictures of identifiable patients unless we have their permission or the permission of their next of kin. In the case of Tony Bland his parents had given permission for the press to reproduce his picture. They will have had their own reasons for taking that decision, but we believe that publishing a picture ofhim adds importantly to the information available in words. Some doctors have never seen a patient in a persistent vegetative state. Another reason for publishing pictures is to distinguish one section of the journal from another. We rarely publish pictures, tables, or graphs in the editorial section, and we do not add pictures to the original papers. We deliberately include them in the news section to give this section a different identity. These pages are designed to look "newsy," which means including pictures. Newspapers carry pictures, and so do journals like Nature, Science, and the Economist. Sometimes these pictures will not be as relevant as we would like. But this problem is experienced by all publications putting together news pages fast. What J K Anand and J W Myles may not understand is that the BMJ is the most general of the world's general medical journals. Few general practitioners read either the Lancet or the New England