Men of Medicine

The 16 trustees and officers who manage the affairs of the American Medical Association sat silent for 16 min., 40 sec. in a San Francisco room last week. Cause: A preview of the MARCH OF TIME'S monthly cinema on the topic Men of Medicine--1938, a picture of how a young man gets his medical education and interne training, how he sets up practice in a typical small U. S. community, how he accidentally gets and skilfully operates on his first appendix case, how he gives his service free to the poor who attend hospital clinics.

Efforts to provide good medical care for every citizen cause acrimonious rows among doctors. MARCH OF TIME has the spokesmen of conflicting schools present their diverse solutions:

P:Surgeon General Thomas Parran saying: "The underprivileged third of our population, when seriously ill, needs help from tax funds. The health of the people is quite properly the concern of Government.''

P:Yale's Professor of Medicine John Punnett Peters asking that the Federal Government subsidize medical schools, hospitals, research institutions, and pay the hospital and doctor bills of the poor.

P:Manhattan's Sociologist Kingsley Roberts explaining a movement for cooperative medicine under which individuals and families pay dues to an organization which hires doctors to look after them.

P:The spokesman for the majority of the A. M. A.'s 110,000 doctor-members, Dr. Morris Fishbein, arguing that "Every one should have good medical service. But we insist that the practice of medicine is a doctor's problem. The doctor is the only one entitled by training, by experience, and by law to take care of the sick. Medicine is still a profession. It must never become a business or a trade, never the subservient tool of a governmental bureaucracy."

Delighted with this cinema report not only on the U. S. No. 1 medical controversy but on laboratory, office, sickroom and operating room procedures, the heads of the A. M. A. broke their 16 min. 40 sec. silence, voted the A. M. A.'s first official endorsement of a commercial moving picture: "The Board of Trustees of the A. M. A. expresses sincere appreciation of the MARCH OF TIME'S Men of Medicine--1938 as excellent educational material revealing advance of medical science and service of medical science to the sick."

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