ABSTRACT
Notwithstanding Oscar Wilde’s epithet, ‘Everyone who is incapable of learning, has taken to teaching’ and George Bernard Shaw’s scornful, ‘A learned man is an idler who kills time with study’, the relationship between teaching and learning remains so intimate that no practising clinician can ever afford to cease being involved in doing either. We should therefore consider our subject both in the context of the development of academic university departments with their conscious pursuit of scholarship and also in relation to the practising physician in geriatric medicine as he manages and develops his service and treats his patients. The university academic department is the natural home of teaching and scholarship, and the development of 15 academic departments of geriatric medicine in Britain over a period of the same number of years may be seen to mark the movement of the specialty from childhood and puberty into early adult life.
