London.—I hinted before that I wanted to write something about my first chief on his 85th birthday. Thirty years have gone by since I was a very green intern on his service. He retired 20 years ago, and we have not met for a long time nor has it been my privilege to know him well. However, those early 1950s were a time in my career that I still cherish and remember clearly.
Bernard Schlesinger has always had friends all over the world, and a whole generation of paediatricians will be thinking of him and wishing him well in his typical English village retreat in the lush Berkshire countryside. Generous, magnanimous, and a natural leader, he inspired affection, admiration, and respect. Contemporaries will remember his work on the relationship between streptococcal infection and rheumatic fever long before antibiotics and, at a time, when the cause was still a theory.