Changing Times: Reflections on a Professional Lifetime: An Interview with Paul Beeson

Abstract

Paul Bruce Beeson is a child of the American frontier, the younger son of a dedicated general practitioner. Dr. Beeson's adventure was academic medicine; he studied at McGill University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Rockefeller Hospital in New York, and the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. He became the Professor and Chair of the departments of medicine at Emory University and Yale University, and then, in Oslerian fashion, was appointed Nuffield Professor of Medicine at Oxford University. His legacy is his pupils, a Who's Who of 20th-century medicine. Dr. Beeson embodies the caring mission of medicine. He prefers to emphasize the patient–physician relationship and the social obligations of medicine; for example, Beeson was a founding member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. It seemed entirely appropriate that his memories and thoughts about 20th-century medicine, which he experienced and exemplified, should be a feature of the first issue of Annals in the year 2000.