SPECIAL ARTICLE

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MR. PRESIDENT, Ladies and Gentlemen: May I begin by telling you how very much I appreciate the honor of being invited to address your society and by thanking you for the compliment to Australian pediatrics which this invitation implies. Your President, Dr. Hodes, has just referred to my maternal American genes and I hope that the presence of these chromosomes may help in some little way to improve my status as an amateur ambassador of Australian pediatrics in this country. Just in case your President's other kind remarks have given you the wrong impression, I feel that I should begin by offering you some sort of explanation of my present professorial act which is a new and very shaky one. During the past 10 or 15 years, a form of animal life, well-known in your country for at least half a century, has appeared with increasing frequency in various universities of the British Isles, a new species of "homo medicus"—in other words, the professional pediatric pedagogue complete with chalk and blackboard. For the past two years I have had the honor and the rather doubtful pleasure of being the first example of this new form of animal life to appear in the Australian pediatric jungle. As most of you know, pediatrics is a very young and Cinderella-like specialty in our country. A little more than 25 years ago when I first faced the general public as a would-be physician it was regarded as impossible for a young man to earn an adequate living as a pediatrician, and as a result, almost half of my professional life has been spent in general practice.

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