Who Cares About Care?

Dr. Louis H. Bauer, president of the American Medical Association, was downcast. Of some 4,000 internists who traveled to the Atlantic City convention of the American College of Physicians last week, only 75 saw fit to attend a panel discussion on "The Internist's Relation to Citizenship." Dr. Bauer, moderator of the discussion, surveyed the sparse audience and reflected gloomily: "Medicine is no longer a purely scientific problem. It has social and economic factors. Doctors should take an interest in those phases as well as the scientific ones ... If [a] program sounds anything like talk about medical economics, they won't come unless they expect to see a fight."

"People are puzzled today as to how you get medical care," said another panel member. He thought internists should "interpret and lead." But few conventioneers seemed interested in citizenship problems. While the panel met, more than 1,000 physicians pushed into another meeting room to hear a highly technical discussion of a couple of autopsies--involving problems that the average internist seldom meets in a lifetime of normal practice.

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