Sggļļ We are gathered for our 55th annual meeting, but as far as I can tell! 8® from a review of the Bulletin, mine is only the tenth presidential address. In 1964 Lloyd Stevenson was the first to carry out this pleasant task when he spoke about" New Diseases in the Seventeenth Century" here in Bethesda. 1 Today, I will take this opportunity to tell you of a book I have begun to write about the history of pre-medical education in America. The second half of my title gives me license to tell you a few pieces of the story rather than to sketch an outline of the whole. In 1902, when Ira Remsen had the intimidating task of following Daniel C. Gilman in the presidency of the Johns Hopkins University, he opened his inaugural address by noting that," It has been said that old men tell of what they have seen and heard, children of what they are doing, and fools of what they are going to do." 2 1 will disregard this wise warning and tell you a little bit about a large subject. I want to say something of what I have seen and heard, what I have read and thought about, and with due humility, what might be done about it.

I. When I was a pre-medical student in Berkeley thirty years ago, most of my friends and I enjoyed college. To be sure, we were aware of some competition, and I did know that one of the Ten Commandments of chemistry was" Do not spit into thy neighbor's unknown." Aside from occasional ghastly tales, we were not much concerned about any serious poisoning of our atmosphere. Although there are in the literature of the 1950s descriptions of what, today, has come to be known as the pre-med syndrome, I did not observe it at the time.