About our history

Abstract

On January 28, 2005, the Uruguayan Medical Union celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the defeat of the intervention, an event that occurred already in the final throes of the military dictatorship.

That unforgettable democratic milestone meant the reconquest of the best traditions and achievements of the medical union. One of the most important was the beginning of the second period of the Medical Review of Uruguay, from that same year 1985.

The Medical Review of Uruguay had been created at the beginning of the dictatorship, during the presidency of Dr. José Pedro Cirillo. In the words of its current director, Dr. Ariel Montalbán, “his birth goes hand in hand with the drive, creativity, enthusiasm and courage of four young doctors: Juan Carlos Macedo, Homero Bagnulo, Hugo Dibarboure and Barrett Díaz” ( 1).

The essential Macedo defined the emergence, which occurred "in other times, in dark times, the dictatorship already installed", as "an act of reaffirmation of the presence of the union, of the legitimacy of its validity, as an act of clarity and reunion since our time. specificity, as an act of civilization in times of destruction ”(2).

The reconquest of the Union was also the recovery of the Medical Review of Uruguay, which, with this first issue of volume 21, reaches twenty years of its second era.

During these twenty years, a group of colleagues - as outstanding from an academic point of view as a trade union - has taken on their shoulders, in an honorary and disinterested way, the complex task of maintaining and qualifying more and more the Medical Journal of Uruguay. This individual and collective effort, together with a clear policy of strict adherence to the referee system, has led it to be the main national biomedical publication, to be included in international databases and, therefore, to be the most frequently cited in works published in foreign magazines.

Also during these two decades the electronic format was developed –which since 2002 made a leap in quality by moving to the PDF format– greatly facilitating accessibility to the production of Uruguayan researchers.

The Uruguayan Medical Journal faces new challenges in its intention to access even more demanding quality standards. The enormous experience and work capacity of the Editorial Board that has conducted it with such success in the last twenty years, together with the contribution of the new members that the Executive Committee has appointed, allows us to expect new achievements.

“Acting in the area of ​​medical culture is one of the aspects of the union policy of greatest importance, impact and responsibility that the SMU must comply with. It is a constitutive task ”(2).