The choice of a subject for the opening address to the Society is a traditional prerogative of its president and I have selected "Pediatric Education at the Crossroads" as timely and important.
I'd like to begin by telling you what is, unhappily, a true story. Recently I met with a former house officer of the mid 1940s. He was a sensible and well-balanced man, an excellent clinician with a warm love and understanding of children, and he had gone into practice with the highest hopes.
I now learned he had given up practice to resume full-time work. For over a decade, it emerged, the practice of pediatrics had somehow never lived up to his earlier expectations. He listed, among other negative aspects: long hours of routine work; continuous harassment by parents, including night telephone calls and daylight nagging, and, most important of all, a lack of intellectual excitement, challenge, and