Mindful of the findings of its Committee on Medicine and the Changing Order, the New York Academy of Medicine, in connection with its centennial celebration, held an Institute on Social Medicine in the spring of 1947. To this institute came 50 eminent participants representing a wide variety of professional backgrounds. The group included historians, physicians, philosophers, public health and nutrition experts, educators and administrators, psychologists and sociologists "each to contribute to the pool of thought from which the idea of social medicine might rise and form."