The history of postgraduate medicine education.

Although formal postgraduate medical education may be a recent phenomenon, many long-established medical societies throughout Britain have contributed to the continuing medical education of established practitioners while the specialist societies have made an immense contribution to the dissemination ofnew knowledge and many consultants regard these societies as the most valuable source ofnew knowledge in their field. The need for the medical practitioner to devote himself to a lifetime of study was stressed by Osler in a valedictory address to students at McGill University in 1905 when he said: 'The hardest conviction to get into the mind of a beginner is that the education upon which he is engaged is not a College Course, not a Medical Course but a Life Course, for which the work of a few years under teachers is but a preparation'.' Osler later became Chairman of the Postgraduate Medical Association in this country, an organization set up in 1911 to develop postgraduate medical training in the UK, although its activities were curtailed by the First World War. At the end of the war the Fellowship of Medicine was established by a group of distinguished doctors in London, again with the objective of promoting postgraduate studies, particularly for ex-service medical officers and the two organizations then combined under the presidency ofOsler, eventually becoming the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine.2 Over the years the development of postgraduate medical education has been influenced by a series of reports from influential committees, by legislation (Tables I and II) and in response to the changing needs of medical graduates in the light of the remarkable advances in medical science and technology that have taken place particularly over the last few decades, and in response to changes in the pattern of health care delivery. As Sir David Innes Williams said in the 60th anniversary issue of the Postgraduate Medical Journal, this development has been erratic, intermittent, unco-ordinated and the result of the separate endeavours of many different bodies.3 In 1921 the Athlone Committee on postgraduate medical education4 suggested that a university medical school devoted solely to postgraduate medical education should be established in a London hospital and associated with London University; that the specialist hospitals should be linked to the new postgraduate school and that a central office should be set up to co-ordinate and develop postgraduate activities in London. As a result the British Postgraduate Medical School was established at Hammersmith Hospital becoming a school of the university in 1934 and being officially opened by King George V in 1935. It was not until after the Goodenough Report was published in 19445 that the British Postgraduate Medical Federation was set up in 1945 receiving its Charter as a School of London University in 1947. The federation comprised 12 institutes and their specialist hospitals together with the Postgraduate Medical School, which was granted royal status in 1966 and reverted to being an independent school of the University in 1974. The Goodenough Report was mainly concerned