Physicians to the world.

Abstract

IN ACCEPTING the office of President of the American Medical Association, I do so with deep feelings of appreciation, humility, and responsibility. My sense of responsibility is heightened by realization of the tremendous number and variety of challenges which medicine faces today. As individual physicians, members of organized medicine and citizens in the community and the nation, we have in recent decades encountered an ever-increasing complexity of demands on our time and thought. Now, like all of our fellow Americans, we find our problems compounded by the world struggle for survival and freedom—in the new age of hydrogen bombs, ballistic missiles, and earth satellites. In recent years the individual physician has had an increasingly difficult time in trying to keep up with the accelerated scientific advances in medicine. Now, with man probing into outer space, it appears that our scientific future will be further complicated by the development of still