It was established in 1856 as the Transactions of the Medical Society of the State of California.

It was renamed California State Journal of Medicine in 1902 and volume numbering was restarted at 1.

In 1974, it obtained its final title, Western Journal of Medicine,[1] which was styled as wjm from 1999 on.

[4] The journal was lastly published by the BMJ Group with Michael Wilkes as its editor-in-chief.

[2] The journal was abstracted and indexed by EBSCO databases, Gale databases, MEDLINE, ProQuest, PubMed, and Scopus.