Medicine in Kentucky by John H. Ellis

Author:John H. Ellis [Ellis, John H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9780813184661
Google: NksoEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-10-21T22:13:18+00:00

5

REFORM AND RECONSTRUCTION

NO TWO MEN have had an impact on the American medical profession and its institutions comparable to that of two Kentuckians, one a physician and the other a schoolteacher. Born on a Nelson County farm November 9, 1847, Joseph Nathaniel McCormack was mostly self-taught as a boy, learning while working with his brothers and their farmer-storekeeper father. After graduating from the Miami Medical College of Ohio in 1870, he returned to Nelson County, married, and began the practice of medicine. McCormack encountered difficulties, however, including a severe illness with typhoid fever, and in 1876 he moved to Bowling Green in Warren County to join the practice of an elderly physician, Dr. Lemuel C. Porter. Outstanding service during the Bowling Green yellow fever epidemic in 1878 brought him an appointment to the State Board of Health the following year. As its secretary and executive officer after 1883, McCormack designed Kentucky’s increasingly restrictive medical practice laws and sought legislation to advance the cause of public health.

McCormack’s success in mixing politics and medicine, his reorganizational work in the Kentucky State Medical Society, and his magnetic personality brought him to the attention of high officials in the American Medical Association who sought to make that organization an effective force in national politics. At the turn of the century fewer than 9,000 of the country’s approximately 100,000 regular physicians held membership in the AMA, and no more than 25 percent belonged to affiliated state and local societies. Moreover, since 40 percent of doctors who had a direct or indirect relationship to the AMA lived in a cluster of states contiguous to its Chicago headquarters, the organization was really a northcentral and eastern regional medical society with little or no influence in the South and West. R. L. Polk’s Medical and Surgical Register of the United States for 1890 lists twenty-three state, sectarian, specialty, and local medical societies in Kentucky. At that time the state medical society scarcely enrolled 10 percent of the Commonwealth’s approximately 3,000 regular physicians. By 1903, with its name changed that year, the Kentucky State Medical Association had enrolled nearly 1,400 regular doctors, thanks to Dr. McCormack’s decade of organizational work.

Appointed chairman of the AMA’s Committee on Organization in 1900, McCormack’s design for reform was adopted the following year. One object of the plan was to bring doctors who had strayed into specialty organizations back into the general fold. A second closely related object was to make the county medical society the profession’s basic organizational unit. Local membership automatically conferred membership in the state medical society, and state societies were constituent members of the AMA. Where Dr. Charles Caldwell had envisioned a “Diet” or “Amphyctyonic Council” to rule the whole in 1831, McCormack’s committee placed legislative power in the hands of representatives from state societies to be known as the AMA’s House of Delegates. In 1903, as a further effort to swell the ranks of organized medicine, the AMA abandoned the old ethical code’s sanctions against professional relations with other sectarian practitioners.

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