Nineteen eighty-six is a most appropriate year in which to be writing about developments in the organ-specific, autoimmune endocrine diseases. It celebrates the publication 30 years ago in 1956 of the classic papers of Roitt and Doniach and their co-workers I , and of Rose and Witebsky2 and Adams 3 and Purves . These three sets of fundamental observations provided the initial building blocks upon which much of what has been established in the field in the last 30 years was built. No publication of this nature on endocrine autoimmune disease can cover every aspect of the subject. I have chosen...