50th anniversary of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine--a historical overview.

In the early 1960s, Joachim Brugsch, one of the founders of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (CCLM) (then Zeitschrift für Klinische Chemie), had the idea to found a journal in the upcoming field of clinical chemistry. He approached Ernst Schütte, who was associated with the De Gruyter publishing house through another journal, to participate, and Schütte thus became the second founder of this Journal. The aim was to create a vehicle allowing the experts to express their opinions and raise their voices more clearly than they could in a journal that publishes only original experimental papers, a laborious and difficult, but important endeavor, as the profession of clinical chemistry was still in the early stages of development at this time. The first issue of this Journal was published in early 1963, and today, we are proud to celebrate the 50th anniversary of CCLM. This review describes the development of this Journal in light of the political situation of the time when it was founded, the situation of the publisher Walter De Gruyter after the erection of the Berlin Wall, and the development of clinical chemistry, and later on, laboratory medicine as a well-acknowledged discipline and profession.