Fifty-first Annual Meeting, The Endocrine Society New York, June 29, 1969

A PRESIDENTIAL Address at a Society JLM. banquet is like a second dessert: one admires it politely, hesitates to receive it, and hopes that it will quickly pass by. The speaker may therefore be hopeful but not ambitious. He also suffers another constraint: he must remember that there are ladies present. It is not of course that, in these outspoken times, the presence of ladies need have the least effect on the purity of one's diction, the level of one's taste, or the temptation to use four-letter words, like “love.” It is rather that most of the ladies are sweethearts and wives, adorable and unprofessional, interested in Endocrinology in a very different way from us. The speaker must therefore be considerate of this qualified interest. There are also the ladies of our profession, the lovely and redoubtable few who wear our badge and speak our language.