Traditionally, the President uses this column to report on his activities on behalf of the Society. I am writing one week after taking office, so it could be a short column. Being so new to this office does however, give me the opportunity to write about some other topics. The first is to thank the Society for giving me the honour of being its President. It is a great responsibility and I will need the assistance of many of you to carry out the duties of the office.

Cameron Swift has been an outstanding President. We tend to think of the innovations that have occurred during a presidency, for example, the opening of Marjory Warren House, the changes to the Society’s constitution, and his contribution to the National Service Framework. We must not forget the considerable amount of work that is required to provide day to day leadership to the Society, to which Cameron has put an enormous amount of time and attention. On behalf of the Society, I congratulate Cameron on a very successful term of office and thank him for all he has done for the Society.

We had a most successful Autumn Scientific Meeting at Hammersmith, with over 600 members attending. Organising meetings of this size and complexity is an onerous task and the Society owes a huge debt to its Meetings Secretaries. The breadth of interest of members is shown by the number and variety of the specialty meetings, but I wonder if we lose something by not meeting more often as a Society and hearing the best presentations by its own members on a range of clinical topics. I do not underestimate the task of organising this but it might be something to consider. We look forward to the Spring Meeting in Aberdeen.

I have had the privilege of holding office in a number of organisations of different types and I have noticed a common feature – only the few who hold the senior positions have any idea of the amount of work that is undertaken by the ‘office’ of the organisation. This is true of the BGS. Richard Lynham and his colleagues work long and hard for the Society – specially long and hard around the time of the Scientific Meetings. It is only because of their dedication and attention to detail that the meetings are so successful and that the Society’s affairs are in such good order. The Society owes a huge debt to Richard and his colleagues for their dedication to the Society and to the interests of its members.

I am the second person from Northern Ireland to be elected President of the BGS. The first was Professor George Adams, who was the Society’s second President. I was delighted to receive George’s good wishes just before the Autumn meeting, sent from his home near Oxford. George was one of the founders of both the Society and the specialty, and made a major contribution to our knowledge of strokes. His work on barriers to recovery from stroke, with the late Louis Hurwitz, a Belfast neurologist (eg BMJ 1972; 1: 94-98) can scarcely be bettered today. George was a friend of Marjory Warren and was greatly influenced by her work.

When taking up the Presidency of the Society, George delivered a presidential address, so far as I know, the only such address in the Society’s history. It was published in two parts in Age and Ageing (1974; 4: 1-3) and the BMJ (1974; 2: 789-791). The title was ‘Eld Health’. He had been advised by the Professor of English at Queen’s University Belfast that ‘eld’ was an early English word used to denote an older person, in an analogous way to the word ‘child’ is used for a young person. He suggested that geriatrics might be renamed ‘eld health’ just as paediatrics is known as child health. (It has struck me on a number of occasions that in many ways our specialty has more in common with paediatrics than it has with general medicine). We now know that his suggestion was not taken up. Over a quarter of a century later, however, the question of the best name for our specialty, and for the Society, has still not been answered to everybody’s satisfaction.

I look forward to meeting many members of the Society in the next two years and hearing your views on matters of mutual interest.

Bob Stout
President