I visited 145 Macquarie Street

At the suggestion of our College President, I visited the College library.It is not the sort of place I would usually frequent: picture musty old leather-bound books, dense wood panelling and an air of staleness-dare I say itsadness.But I was in Sydney and somewhat at a loose end, so visit I did.I have been to 145 Macquarie on numerous occasions for Internal Medicine Journal (IMJ) board meetings and love the board room where our band of editors bring joy and I am never alone.Less so the library.I was warmly welcomed by Karen, but evidently she had more important guests elsewhere, and I was promptly left to my own devices.In contrast to the board room, the library was devoid of life.Around me sat silent shelves crammed with leatherbound tomes.Positioned on display here and there were medical implements from bygone eras.I have always found displays of these things more than slightly ghoulish.Images of inadequate anaesthesia spring to mind.Being of a slightly sensitive disposition, I find it deeply disconcerting to be viewing these sorts of implements.I actively seek to avoid such exposures.And then there were the black-and-white photographs of Australian doctors of old.Seemingly every one of them was a man with a ridiculous hat, all unsmiling, as was the expectation with photography of the time.How different, I thought, from my editorial team of today.The previous day had gone well.I had chaired my first IMJ Editorial Board meeting: the first person not named Jeff Szer to have done so for 21 years.My agenda, not the written pre-circulated one, but the real one that I told people about only on the day, was to make it about the people.He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.That is the most important thing, the people.The editors of this Journal give hours of their time every week for scant acknowledgement and certainly no financial compensation.I wanted to reward them with a day that would be collegial, entertaining and informative and that would highlight for them how special their group is.I was nervous.Jeff's are big shoes to fill, but all-in-all, the day seemed to have gone well.So back to the library.Feeling out of place, standing alone, I spied the shelves in the Journals section.I steered in that direction and discovered that in front of me were shelves holding the earliest issues of both IMJ and the New Zealand Medical Journal (NZMJ).As a New