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Inelastic proton scattering at energies of a few 100 MeV and forward angles including 0∘ provides a novel method to measure gamma strength functions (GSF) in nuclei in an energy range of about 5–23 MeV. The experiments provide not only the E1 but also the M1 part of the GSF. The latter is poorly known in heavy nuclei. A case study of 208Pb indicates that the systematics proposed for the M1-GSF in RIPL-3 needs to be substantially revised. Comparison with gamma decay data (e.g. from the Oslo method) allows to test the generalised Brink-Axel (BA) hypothesis in the energy region of the pygmy dipole resonance (PDR) crucial for the modelling of (n,γ) and (γ,n) reactions in astrophysical reaction networks. A fluctuation analysis of the high-resolution data also provides a direct measure of level densities in the energy region well above the neutron threshold, where hardly any experimental information is available.