Personal Preface
I WOULD LIKE to outline the skeletal facts of the enterprise I have been engaged in before I embark upon a psychoanalytically tinged commentary based on my experience to date. The hospital involved is a voluntary 580-bed general hospital which came into existence 17 years ago as the result of the merger of two older institutions. Given a new name, Maimonides Hospital, and a new direction by an enterprising Board of Trustees, it rapidly achieved prominence as an educational and research center. Two major moves were instrumental in bringing about its rapid growth. The first was the commitment to a policy of full-time medicine. The second was the establishment of a training affiliation with the Downstate Medical Center. By the Spring of 1961 there were full-time chiefs in all the major clinical services and many of the subspecialties. It was at that time