[Internal medicine: background, present status and perspectives]

Internal Medicine is a very ancient branch of medicine furnishing unique opportunities for interchange and innovation, essential for the development and renovation of contemporary medicine. It is a fact that during the last twenty years a clear shift in clinical medicine towards extreme specialisation has occurred, but more recently the figure of the "clinician" has once again become central, since he/she is called upon to play a role of great importance in which knowledge of the complexity involved in the management of problematic diseases has to blend and integrate with the fundamental simplicity of the search for so-called "economy" in diagnostic hypotheses.