Pre-Convention Problems

The American Medical Association will meet in Kansas City next month. Some 7,000 U. S. doctors will attend that annual convention. But only 172 members, delegates for the 101,754 A. M. A. members, will have anything authoritative to say, and that only between the authoritative gavel hangings of the Speaker of the House of Delegates, 70-year-old Dr. Nathan Bristol Van Etten of The Bronx.

By last week reports of the A. M. A.'s officers were ready. Noteworthy was Secretary Olin West's report on how the general public is being wooed to support the medical profession. Reported Dr. West: ''Constant progress is being made in most of the states in strengthening the machinery of medical organization and in extending the influence of State and county medical societies. . . . Much closer contact is being maintained with organized groups among the lay public that have concerned themselves with medical and public health affairs. . . . Representatives of the Association have appeared before a greater number of lay audiences than ever before. The editor of the Journal [Dr. Morris Fishbein], the director of the Bureau of Health & Public Instruction [Dr. William Waldo Bauer] and the director of the Bureau of Medical Economics [Dr. Rosco Genung Leland] have appeared as speakers on a number of radio programs and have thus reached audiences that are said to have included millions of persons."

Longtime predecessor of Dr. Van Etten as Speaker of the A. M. A. House of Delegates was Dr. Frederick Cook Warnshuis. Disaffection among A. M. A. delegates and officers plus his own ill health cost Dr. Warnshuis his job. When he took the secretaryship of the California Medical Association, A. M. A. headquarters in Chicago expected him to control that State's alarming tendency toward socialized medicine. But Dr. Warnshuis was unable to prevail against Dr. Walter Bernard Coffey, pugnacious chief surgeon of Southern Pacific Railroad, who bosses the politicians who control the practice of medicine in California. Results: California Medical Association last year practically bolted from the American Medical Association. The A. M. A. refused to elect a California doctor as trustee. Eleven thousand California doctors have virtually no say concerning the practice of their profession.

During the past year these changes affecting the California carbuncle on the body of the A. M. A. have occurred: the A. M. A. has become more lenient toward California experiments in the relation of doctor to patient; California doctors were scared away from drastic changes in ethics by Upton Sinclair's EPIC. Dr. Coffey hopes that by "playing ball" with the A. M. A., that organization will fulfill his dearest wish and agree that he has cured many a case of cancer with hypodermic injections of extracts of adrenal cortex (TIME, Nov. 11 et ante).

Last week California doctors intimated that they were completely cured of their professional heterodoxy. On A. M. A. Secretary Olin West's Chicago desk lay a resolution transmitted by California's Secretary Warnshuis. In that resolution California doctors prayed that the A. M. A. convention next month will condemn a practice which has spread through California. In San Francisco and Los Angeles a doctorless patient may march into a hospital, get a complete diagnosis by X-ray men, pathologists, urinoscopists and other technicians. Since diagnosis has been the prerogative of the practicing physician, "the provision of such diagnostic medical service will inevitably foster fundamental changes in the practice of medicine. . . . Therefore be it Resolved, That . . . [this] practice be terminated as speedily as possible."

Besides such touchy topics, U. S. doctors are to receive from the forthcoming A. M. A. convention the following information: C. A special survey of catgut sutures is under way.

P: Shoes designed to correct foot trouble must be approved by the A. M. A. before a conscientious physician may prescribe them.

P: Concerning Birth Control, the A. M. A. Washington lobby "has taken no part in the activities . . . for the promotion or the defeat of such legislation."

P: The A. M. A.'s publicity bureau, euphemistically called the "Bureau of Health & Public Instruction" is working full blast --by newspaper handouts, pamphlets, radio lectures, college debates, traveling speakers--to remind the public how much good old-fashioned doctoring did for them.

P: The A.M.A. on Jan. 1 was worth $3,821,102. This includes $2,090,414 in government, railroad, municipal and other bonds, $635,096 in cash, $867,564 in property and equipment.

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