Mea culpa: “correcting” my 2012 BMJ article on the Abolitionists and calling on medical institutions to research their links with slavery

In the Christmas issue of The BMJ in 2012 I published an article on the British Abolitionists, arguing that they were the first social movement.1 I was primarily interested in understanding social movements, and I thought that analysing how the Abolitionists had been so effective would both lead to a readable article and be a way to pull out useful points on how a social movement might achieve its aims. This was a reasonable approach to take, but if I were to write the article today I would write it differently. This piece is my “correction” of that article. I’ve put “correction” in inverted commas because nothing in the article is, as far as I know, factually wrong, but I’ve told the story in a biased way.Two quotes are buzzing around in my brain as I begin, the first is the assertion by the historian E H Carr that history…
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