In This Issue T he Milbank Memorial Fund is celebrating its one-hundredth anniversary this year. A centennial is a time for reflection. We look back at what the Fund has accomplished over the last century through its work with individuals and organizations, work that has addressed a wide range of issues in health and social policy. The Milbank Quarterly has been an essential part of this work since its inception in 1923. For this special issue of the Quarterly, we have selected articles from past issues that provide insight into the role of both the Fund and its journal in addressing major policy questions for health services and population health for more than eighty years.Selecting the articles for this issue from the Quarterly's eighty-three volumes was difficult. We agreed that the selected articles should be interesting to read in 2005. Moreover, they should discuss major issues in health policy as well as aspects of the Fund's work during the past eight decades. We looked for articles that dealt with issues that were important in the past and are still significant today, such as health care coverage for the uninsured, the cost and organization of health care, and the growing prevalence of chronic illness. The articles we chose also provide examples of how scholarship in the disciplines that study health services and population health has changed over time.