The paper is concerned with foundation of the Association of Medical Physicists under the Physical Society of the USSR. The Association is to unite the efforts of physicists, chemists, mathematicians and engineers working at the medical institutions and engaged in physical problems of medicine and in the design of appropriate instruments, devices, equipment and materials in industry, at the Institutes of the Academy of Sciences, and at higher educational establishments. The functions of medical physicists and their roles in consolidation of the relations between medicine and natural sciences and engineering are discussed.