Good evening and welcome. In opening this year's business meeting, I want us all to take a moment to remember Art Rubel. As you all know, Art passed away earlier in the year. Can you all remember the very first time that you ever read a paper by Art? Quite honestly, I cannot. What that really means is that I've been reading Art Rubel's papers for longer than I can remember. Now, I'm not exactly a spring chicken in this business, and I suspect that I first read a paper by Art when I was an undergraduate some thirty years ago. Probably it was his paper on folk illnesses in a Texas border town. For me, given my own research interests, Art's think piece on an epidemiology of cultural syndromes has always been a favorite. And of course: susto.

When we remember Art, we will think of the many important scholarly contributions that he made to the growth of the field of medical anthropology. It is also important to remember the many contributions he made to the field as a profession, including his instrumental roles in the formation of the Society for Medical Anthropology and in the development of the Medical Anthropology Quarterly. He truly was a founding parent for many of us.

I only came to know Art personally some 3 or 4 years ago. My midwestern, small town roots are not far behind me, so I still get excited when I get the opportunity to meet someone whose work I have read and admired. What immediately struck me upon meeting Art was his kindness and generosity. These were both expressed in his genuine interest in what other people were working on, and in his encouraging counsel based on years of experience. This dimension to him was even more striking to me when we met for lunch in San Francisco at the joint SMA/SfAA meeting in the spring of 2000. We had a couple of graduate students from Alabama with us who were attending, I think, their first national meeting. Art was delighted to talk to them about what their interests were and where they wanted to go in anthropology. Needless to say, for these students, it was a thrill.

In remembering Art, it is important to remember that SMA/SfAA meeting, because he had a lot to do with the planning for the plenary session, which was all about medical anthropology as anthropology and as a social science. There are those folks still around who view medical anthropology as a kind of applied field, especially when they see our activities in areas like public health and clinical medicine, and our work in concert with agencies like the NIH and CDC. But I think that Art was impatient with the kind of rigid thinking that can pit theory against application, or that would regard the phrase "a science of culture" as an incurable oxymoron. Rather, Art struck me as the kind of guy who is really interested in learning about how people do things, how they think about what they do, and what influences all that doing and thinking. He was interested in the larger theoretical questions entailed by what he was finding, as well as how he could put what he was finding to work to ameliorate human suffering. In other words, he wasn't a medical anthropologist or an applied anthropologist or a this anthropologist or a that anthropologist. He was an anthropologist.

As individuals and as a society we will miss Art. I also think that we still have a lot to learn from him.