Abstract
The Shikoku Association of Agricultural Medicine-Rural Health, which was organized in 1975 as a local chapter of the Japanese Association of Rural Medicine, last year celebrated the 20th anniversary of its existence. At the beginning of a new year, the author would like to look back on the past years and dwell on what it should be in the future.
Agricultural medicine-rural health, which has a character of agricultural medicine and rural health combined in practice, is such a branch of social medicine that its mission is to provide comprehensive medical and health care for the rural populace.
Foreseeing its future requires us to envison what the Japanese rural community and agriculture would be like in the future. There is every indication that agriculture will become more and more specialized and larger in scale from now on. In parallel with this trend, rural medicine will be required more than ever to make an approach to the specialized farmers group and agricultural management group from the viewpoint of agricultural medicine. In the meantime, the rural community will get more mixed in terms of sociology, with an increasing number of inhabitants finding their occupation in other than agriculture, and our preventive health services will become more important. Moreover, care for aging rural inhabitants will become a problem we have to address ourselves to more resolutely.
And lastly, the author would feel like to propose that a rural medical laboratory be establish within hospitals affiliated with the Welfare Federation of Agricultural Cooperatives.
