The country slumps in the middle of a global depression, with a declining economy associated with rising unemployment rates running at 20%.1 Internationally, the USA looks poised to elect a Democrat for a second term and the world is watchful of expansionist aims in the Oriental East. The year is 1937 and the eastern nation was Japan, and the culmination of all those events was to be the second major international conflict of the 20th century.

If the political world in 2012 is only somewhat different, the medical world is utterly so. The British Society of Gastroenterology (BSG) was formed in 1937, driven by Sir Arthur Hirst, as a club of 39 gentleman members.2 It was not …