Angry Voice

"And this, ladies and gentlemen," trumpets the guide as he conducts his sightseeing party past an impressive, eight-story structure on Chicago's North Dearborn Street, "is the American Medical Association, founded by Dr. Morris Fishbein." Officials of the century-old A.M.A. are no longer amused by this glorification of noisy Dr. Fishbein, 58. He is the nation's most ubiquitous, most widely maligned, and perhaps most influential medico. U.S. medicine has many anti-Fishbeinites, and the A.M.A. has lately been trying to soft-pedal its best-known doctor.

Easier said than done. That was demonstrated again this week when the A.M.A. gathered in Atlantic City to celebrate its 100th anniversary. Outstanding item in the celebration was a newly published 1,205-page History of the American Medical Association--1847 to 1947 (Saunders; $10). The author: Dr. Morris Fishbein.

Technically, Dr. Fishbein is no longer the official spokesman for the A.M.A. But he remains a powerful voice in U.S. medicine. Of the nation's 190,000 doctors, 130,000 are A.M.A. members and subscribers to the Journal (familiarly known as the "J.A.M.A."), which Fishbein edits. For all practical purposes, the Journal is the A.M.A. It grosses $1,750,000 a year in advertising revenue, largely supports the Association and is the chief contact most U.S. doctors have with medical news and medical politics. The A.M.A.'s huge Chicago headquarters is largely the house that Fishbein built.

Beware the Newfangled! Though he could doubtless make more money elsewhere, Dr. Fishbein stays on with A.M.A. (at $24,000--which he doubles by outside writing and lecturing) because he loves his job. His entire working life has been spent on the Journal; he became the assistant editor in 1912, a year after he graduated from Rush Medical College. Fishbein has one absorbing interest--medical research --and two absorbing hatreds--quacks and socialized medicine. His special fame has come from his slam-bang crusading in all three fields.

Fishbein thinks nothing of paying telegraph tolls (fairly rare in trade magazines) on a 7,000-word medical article that he considers hot news. He boasts that he has been sued for a total of $35 million in libel suits--and never lost a suit. In his History, he proudly dates the A.M.A.'s "war against socialized medicine" from the year (1924) that he took over the Journal's editorship.

A.M.A.'s birth in 1847, Fishbein thinks, ranks in historical and scientific importance with two other events of that same year: Helmholtz's discovery of the law of conservation of energy and the first use of chloroform in anesthesia. In those days, it took only 16 weeks of medical study to get a doctor's diploma. The A.M.A. was founded, by a zealous doctor named Nathan Smith Davis, primarily to raise medical training standards.

The A.M.A. early decided that it was unethical for a doctor "to promise radical cures" or to obtain patients by "gaining the attention of the public." Its Journal has fought to raise and preserve medical ethics--and has always been suspicious of newfangled notions. In 1871 an A.M.A. president found women "totally unfit" to be doctors (the first woman was admitted to A.M.A. five years later). The Journal announced itself horrified by the "cigaret-soaked indecencies" of the naughty '90s, and peddled the theory that tight-laced corsets were responsible for gallstones. It launched crusades for a "Safe & Sane" Fourth of July, for white blankets (to show dirt) and separate tooth-brushing basins in Pullman washrooms. But far & away its liveliest campaigns have been Fishbein's terrible-tempered crusades against quacks.

Down with All Quacks! The Journal lost its first suit, which was filed by the makers of Wine of Cardui, a herb-and-alcohol mixture advertised as a cure for "any sort of female trouble," but widely sold to men who drank it straight). The A.M.A. considered the loss (if damages) a great moral victory. Soon afterward, when Fishbein became editor, he was encouraged to begin beating the bushes. Some of the odd game he flushed: a healer named Percival Lemon Clark, who attacked all diseases with a "sanatology blower" that was supposed to "dry clean the entire [internal] system"; a California dentist who called himself Painless Parker (use of the word "painless" was forbidden by law); a jack of all diseases named John Paul Fernel, who designed a "sleeping brassiere," for reducing oversized busts.

But "the greatest charlatan in medical history," Fishbein thinks, was the late John R. Brinkley, famed "goat gland doctor," who narrowly missed being elected governor of Kansas. At one time Brinkley had three yachts, a 16-cylinder red Cadillac, diamond rings, an estate with great fountains illumined by his name in electric lights, and a $1,300,000 income from gullible patients who insisted on being grafted with goat glands (at $750 an operation). Fishbein observes that the only thing to do with "great charlatans of the Brinkley type" is to lock them up, but thinks that the public's gullibility is probably incurable.

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