Presidential Address 2012 and AGM

Dr Nabil Jarad

‘Respiratory Medicine in Bristol, the Hospital and the Community’

For the past 138 years, the Bristol Medico-Chirurgical (Med-Chi) Society has set up a series of forums on contemporary issues of importance to the medical fraternity in Bristol. The programme for the forthcoming year will cover several general areas including renal medicine, oncology, psychiatry, cardiology, respiratory medicine and the important interface between primary and secondary care. The messages for each session are expected to be applicable and generaliseable to other areas of medicine and will hopefully be thought provoking. 

Each evening is planned to be a pleasant mix of a social event followed by an informative lecture. The sessions this year will be at the Engineer’s House, Clifton which is an excellent venue.  There will be first-class catering and, in the long tradition of the Bristol Med Chi, the speakers are of high calibre who are known locally, nationally and internationally. We hope that you will be able to attend many of these evenings and enrich them with your participation.

Apart from chest infections and surgically resectable entities, respiratory medicine was a specialty that Voltaire once described the role of its specialists to be ‘to amuse the patient until the disease takes its course’.

Over the past 30 years, respiratory medicine has been witnessing a ‘new birth’ owed to the introduction of new investigations and new modalities of treatment. This, and the increasing demand of aging patients, the overlap with acute care, community care and oncology, together with the call for personalised medicine, has provided opportunities for an old specialty to expand and to modernise in order to meet these exciting changes.