CONCERNING CONFERENCES

The conference, and especially the international conference, is one of the most remarkable phenomena of modern society. Infectious and insidious, it has during the last few decades penetrated to all the corners of the world. While it has reached real epidemic proportions in the USA and Western Europe, it is now to be found everywhere—ceremoniously in Asia, seriously in Africa south of the Sahara, importantly in Latin America, relentlessly behind the Iron Curtain. Not only is it rampant in the great cities of the world, but as an off‐peak support of the hotel industry it is to be found in every English spa and seaside resort, in alpine villages, Greek islands, in the Stockholm Skärgard, on ships at sea, and even in aeroplanes. I heard the other day of a conference being planned for tranquillity on Volcano, one of the Lepari Islands!