One afternoon in October 1961, I received a very pleasant surprise. Out of the blue, without any previous discussion, one of my patients, Mrs. Janet Upjohn Stearns, made an appointment to come to my office at 550 Park Avenue to discuss an important matter. She was a member of the Upjohn family, her grandfather, Dr. W. O. Upjohn, had founded the pharmaceutical house in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her husband was Dr. William Stearns, a highly regarded chest specialist on our staff. Mrs. Stearns was referred to me in 1958 because of a mysterious ailment that had begun in her childhood and had eluded diagnosis despite much effort by many consultants. Her symptoms were chiefly abdominal, consisting of recurrent severe abdominal distention, flatulence, recurrent foul diarrhea, cramps, fatty-food intolerance, weight loss, weakness, and episodes suggestive of hypoglycemia. She was known to be allergic to a wide variety of foods and medications. I examined her carefully and did a workup for malabsorption that led me to diagnose her ailment as non-tropical sprue. Assisting me to make this diagnosis was the fact that one of her children had severe celiac disease. I prescribed a strict low-gluten diet, vitamin therapy, and elimination of offending foods. She cooperated to the letter and soon was feeling better than she had in years. She had just returned from a visit to her mother in Kalamazoo, where she learned that she was being given a large gift of Upjohn corporate stock to use as she saw fit. Her mother was aware that her daughter had suffered a rather turbulent life, complicated in part by her previously undiagnosed ailments. Now that she was physically much improved due to her new therapeutic program, her mother advised her daughter to use her inheritance to help others and to do this during her lifetime so that she might witness in person and enjoy the happiness that comes from helping others. Mrs. Stearns said she had hurried home with her mind made up to do something major to help me to develop gastroenterology at Columbia-Presbyterian. As a patient of mine, she had been admitted to Harkness Pavilion and was pleased with her treatment. She also observed how difficult it was to perform an adequate malabsorption workup in a setting lacking a formal commitment to the specialty of gastroenterology.