Finding our way on a path to the future.

Abstract

It is with the deepest gratitude that I accept the high honor which you have entrusted to me. I am proud to be privileged to put on the mantle of leadership, worn in the past by so many distinguished physicians. I look forward to meeting the responsibilities and challenges that devolve upon all of us at this, for us, dramatic time in the history of medicine. I shall carry the title of President of this Association with understandable pleasure for the next year, and to the best of my ability shall discharge the obligations and responsibilities inherent in this honored position. Yet, I am not so naive—or so presumptuous— as to believe that the future of medicine in America lies exclusively in my hands, nor that it lies entirely in those of other officers, or of members of boards and councils and of delegates to the legally constituted legislatures of