Thomas Clark Chalmers was in our world for 78 years. Few men and women in medicine have better spent their time among us for all of us, not just for their own patients. I say "for all of us," because in time we all become patients. Chalmers pushed more and more physicians to ask themselves again and again, "Why am I prescribing this drug? Why am I recommending this surgery?" We will all benefit from these questions. The obituary for him in The New York Times [1] leads with what he did for The Mount Sinai School of Medicine. But it does give space to the more important work he did for the whole world of medical practice: relentlessly promoting meta-analysis in the clinical world for more critical judgments based on wider and stronger foundations of evidence. Many details of how he did this have been set forth elsewhere [1]. What do these details represent about the man? How do many of us see their sum embodied in his person?

He was a man of his own mind. So what if Professor I. M. Authority says in a textbook or a lecture to do this or that for the treatment of polymyalgic choreopsis? "This is what you recommend? Show me, give me the evidence," said Chalmers. These are questions many may have asked before him, but few have pushed and pushed and pushed again and again as he did for believable, reliable answers. Even of those who have, few have shown ways to get the best answers with more effect than Chalmers. And he pushed right up to the end of his life, despite the grinding down of his body with prostatic cancer. The words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to a young man [2] could also have come from Chalmers in his last days: "... If the Great Panjandrum ... were to say to me, ‘Oliver, in five minutes you have got to jump,’ I should still say, ‘Lord, I'm sorry it isn't ten.’"

Chalmers was a man who looked for the future; he knew the past and its limits and would not accept them. I cannot illustrate this better than by describing briefly my closest days with him.

Shortly after I retired from the editorship of Annals of Internal Medicine, I was asked by the American Association for the Advancement of Science to organize an editorial apparatus for The Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials. I was fully aware of the risks in launching the journal. It would be a highly unconventional vehicle for research reports from authors accustomed to the value of seeing their names visible on the front covers of conventional organs; in a purely electronic journal, their names would be "invisible." Hence, I wished to associate with the project the best minds I could find. I especially wished to get the minds of men and women who would not be afraid of a risky enterprise, who would be eager to take part in it for its promise of more adequate reporting of evidence than we are accustomed to in orthodox journals. Offered the chance to collaborate, Chalmers did see the potentials right off-the means of reporting more data more thoroughly analyzed than orthodox journals were willing to carry. He joined me eagerly. That The Online Journal did not flourish as we hoped during our work with it still does not undermine the potentials we saw in it. Chalmers could always see a future sooner and more clearly than most others in academic medicine. To Wilfred Trotter, one of the more idiosyncratic minds of British medicine early in this century, is attributed [3] the observation that "... the most powerful antigen known to man is a new idea." To Chalmers, new ideas were not antigens, they were metabolites for the mind.

We miss you in the flesh, Dr. Chalmers, but you live on in the steadily growing numbers of us who hear your voice and again and again ask ourselves, "Why?"