The Doctors Look Ahead

The queues in Atlantic City's expensive restaurants were never longer, the prices never higher, the exhibits never gaudier. The conventioneers were plied with free drinks, free cigarets, free gadgets, fan dances. To oldtimers, the American Medical Association's 100th anniversary convention last week seemed to be its biggest and most star-spangled.

Thoroughly relaxed, A.M.A.'s delegates gossiped, gamboled and, for a few days, found nothing much to argue about. But by convention's end, some solemn business demanded attention after all. One grim reminder was a pair of radioactive goats (survivors of Bikini) munching hay in the exhibition hall. Another was an appeal by Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson for the doctors' support of a bill to remedy a serious shortage of Army doctors. The Army has only 1,100 Regulars in its Medical Corps, needs 6,000 for its present strength of some 1,000,000 men. The bill would raise medical officers' pay, let the Army hire civilian doctors (at salaries up to $11,000), give doctors more voice in Army medical policies.

But the bill is only a peacetime measure, and does not touch the vastly greater problem of medical mobilization for a possible World War III. On that problem, the delegates were confronted with a grim report by a special committee headed by A.M.A.'s president, Dr. Edward L. Bortz of Philadelphia.

The Minute Men. In any future war, doctors expect to have to cope with simultaneous mass attacks--atomic bombs, poisons (probably radioactive), viruses and bacteria--on many cities and industrial suburbs. The nation's doctors and all health facilities would have to be ready for total mobilization within 24 hours. A major problem: preventing the disruption of health services by the first attack (as happened in Hiroshima). Atomic-age warfare, military and medical men agree, would wipe out all distinction between combatants and noncombatants: there would probably be more civilian than military casualties, and doctors would have to be assigned flexibly to both groups.

The A.M.A. proposed that 1) a National Emergency Medical Service Administration be organized to prepare for medical mobilization, 2) medical officers be consulted by the military on war plans, 3) civilian needs be considered in the building of military hospitals, and 4) plans be made for efficient wartime use of doctors.* First step (to be taken by A.M.A.): a card system registering every U.S. doctor as a "minute man." His title will mean what it says.

* An A.M.A. poll of Medical Corps veterans showed that during World War II both Army & Navy doctors spent only half of their time on medical work. The doctors concluded that the military could have got along with three-quarters as many doctors as they drafted.

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