An architect intent upon his drawing board and blue-prints at times must back away from the minutiae, stand off, and let his fancy soar. On this centennial occasion let us look up from our myopic concern with the things of the moment and consider the design and structure of internal medicine in America over the past hundred years, the present, and the future into which we are flowing on the inexorable tides of time.
The occasion of celebrating the 100th birthday of what is now the Section on Internal Medicine of the American Medical Association sets the stage for review, view, and preview. Americans, having no official royalty or nobility, miss the pageantry of celebrations of the old world where numerous institutions have marked many a hundred-year notch on the long calendars of their antiquity. A democracy with more pliable forms responds very rapidly to the forces which shape society.