It is always interesting to see just what enables some of the more durable medical websites to continue an apparently viable existence for over 10 years.

I recall looking at the UK-based Priory site some 8-10 years ago in the days when there was a relatively limited selection of primary care review type websites for GPs. In fact, Priory Lodge Education states theirs were the first medical journals on the internet and that may well have been somewhat accurate.

The Priory site was started back in 1994 by a medical duo of directors, Ben Green and Rob Glenning. The concept was said to be a radical vision of Green's - to produce a suite of low-cost and "high-exposure" medical journals available at no charge to everybody.

Part of this vision was a belief "that medical knowledge should not be parcelled up and sold to the highest bidder or available only to an academic elite".

Against large publishing houses with large advertising accounts their journals were noted to enjoy a zero advertising budget and yet have survived and prospered for nearly 10 years.

The Priory journals started out with a significant emphasis on psychiatric review articles rather than general medicine or primary care and to a large extent this is still true, perhaps reflecting the personal clinical interests of their founders.

Over the next 10 years or so after 1994 the range of journals gradually extended to include psychiatry, medicine, family medicine, chest medicine, dentistry, veterinary, pharmacy, anaesthesia, general practice and, most curious of all perhaps, history of medicine.

But it doesn't stop there - or as they say on TV - wait there's more. New journals which can be expected "soon" include online versions of EBM, medical ethics, paediatrics, obstetrics, gynaecology, microbiology, cardiology, surgery, pharmacology, psychology, health management and nursing. I think the "soon" statement was posted a few years ago now, but again as they say "all good things take time".

So, just what do we find lurking in the Priory? Superficially the site seems well organised with specific rules for authors, how to submit a paper and opportunities for sponsorships.

However, perusing the family medicine and the general practice journals is curiously interesting. The small range of 45 articles in the former (considering the 16 years of publication) comes out at around just 2-3 papers per annum. But, having said that, the selection is rather interesting including a fascinating analysis of just how bad UK GPs are with measuring visual acuities, a familial breast cancer questionnaire, assessment of neck lumps, managing infertility in general practice, the management of insomnia, developmental assessment of young children, paediatric obesity and chronic sinusitis.

All good stuff; but then for something a little tangential we find a review article on a "Networked telemedicine solution for the Ecuadorian Amazons". Yes, seriously. I am not sure just why, but it was at about this time that I had a Monty Pythonesque flashback.

Indeed, the articles are so thematically divergent, I just cannot imagine they would have been invited.

So, we move back to where it "all started" on the psychiatry pages. Here, we can find a large treasure trove of fascinating psychiatric entertainment and memorabilia.

We also discover here Ben Green is indeed a consultant psychiatrist and senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool - and with perhaps an "interest" in general medicine and the primary secondary care interface - a "man for all seasons". And to add to the Pythonesque flavour, we can find a year 2000 article on Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) by a Doctor Said. "LOL" as my kids would add.

But I was impressed with a large list of nearly 200 review articles on psychiatric topics. For example, residual neurological adverse effects after discontinuing SSRI medications, the aetiology of schizophrenia, prediction of response to lithium, a contested disease state: chronic fatigue syndrome, durkheim's social theory of suicide, chronic mild encephalopathy due to hepatitis C virus - the evidence for a common psychiatric illness, clozapine-induced cardiomyopathy, etc.

The fascination with all this rather organic approach to psychiatry (so critically important for primary care clinicians) could only have been superseded with Green's personal 10,000-word treatise on "Psychiatry in the Cinema" covering movies such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, As Good as it Gets, Iris, Awakenings, Shine, A Beautiful Mind, Stigmata and Regarding Henry.

The Priory site is perhaps what would have been a blogsite had it been started in the last few years. Nevertheless, the restrained achievements and enthusiasm of Green have perhaps enabled the project to "stay alive" for 16 years which is way more than we can say for a lot of other fancy advertising driven projects with their expensive website designers and seductive graphics.

They also boast some 180,000 visitors to their sites each month (audit 2002) and only a small percentage of those coming from the UK itself so the choice of topics, especially in their "online psychiatry" must have had a reasonable global appeal