The IAP has a great deal to look forward to in 2018. The up and coming 69th Spring Slide Seminar, new opportunities for the delivery of CME, and next April’s reaccreditation as an ACCME recognized CME provider continue to fulfill the IAP mission. To better serve the Association, it was definitely time for a website up date. There will be even more improvements in the coming weeks.

I cannot look ahead without casting a glance over my shoulder at the past. The new IAP homepage banner contains one of my favorite images from the Indiana Medical History Museum. This is the illustration centerpiece from a 1938 Indiana physician’s license. 

While the figures of the ancient deities Aesculapius and his daughters Hygeia and Panacea are prominent, we see two putti playing at the feet of the gods. One holds a sprig of foxglove (toxicology) and the other peers into a microscope (cellular pathology) while a retort bubbles to the side (chemistry). This juxtaposition of the symbols of classical medical mythology with those of nineteen century scientific medicine still speaks to the relationship between the laboratory and clinical medicine today. Clinicians are still the most visible to the patient and the public, but the clinical and surgical pathology laboratories form the foundation for diagnosis and treatment. With every year, advancements in technology and a better understanding of disease change the way pathologists practice. In spite of great changes, we can look at the original articles of incorporation for the IAP and see the importance of the founding purposes have little changed over the decades:

…the objects of this organization shall be:

a) To maintain high standards of the practice of medicine through the provision of state-of-the-art pathology expertise and laboratory medicine excellence.

b) To stimulate through education, scientific investigation, and promulgation the results of research both basic and applied in the area of laboratory medicine.

c) To promote the practice of scientific medicine by a wider application of clinical and public health laboratory methods to the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease.

d) To promote public knowledge and understanding of the practice of pathology as it relates to the individual, the community, and to the totality of medicine.