A fairly learned society

Specialist societies, with their rituals, camaraderie, and comforting internal politics, constitute one of the unsung glories of British medicine. So it was our great pleasure here in Auchendreich last week to host a meeting of one of the larger, more influential, and generally more worth while examples of the breed.

I should at this point declare an interest. I have been a member of this particular society since the mid 1970s, when as a pale young registrar I presented to one of its scientific sessions a paper which concluded that though the area of study was of some importance the number of subjects had …