The Association of Physicians of Great Britain and Ireland: now what?

Abstract

This inelegant question was stimulated by two related events. The first was the Association's centenary, celebrated in style at the Guy's Hospital Campus of King's College London in 2006; the second, West's elegant account of ‘one hundred years of an association of physicians’.1 Both made me reflect on the continuing fascination of medicine, its distinguished past and exciting future, and the role of the Association. My purpose is not to analyse the many factors contributing to recent changes in clinical practice—society's expectations, the increasing effectiveness, complexity and cost of modern medicine—but rather to consider how the Association might help meet the needs of physicians in the years ahead. Implicit in that self-imposed remit is a sense that the Association may not have been fulfilling that function as well in recent years as formerly. The picture chosen to illustrate West's history of the Association was of Osler. I have considerable regard for William Osler, bringing as he did Scottish educational values, via Canada and the USA, not just to England but to Oxford.2 He practised at a time when medicine was …