Licensed to Practice [Kindle Edition]
Author: James C. Mohr | Language: English | ISBN: B00GBQUB4C | Format: PDF, EPUB
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<![CDATA[ Licensed to Practice begins with an 1891 shooting in Wheeling, West Virginia, that left one doctor dead and another on trial for his life. Formerly close friends, the doctors had fallen out over the issue of medical licensing. Historian James C. Mohr calls the murder "a sorry personal consequence of the far larger and historically significant battle among West Virginia’s physicians over the future of their profession."
Through most of the nineteenth century, anyone could call themselves a doctor and could practice medicine on whatever basis they wished. But an 1889 U.S. Supreme Court case, Dent v. West Virginia, effectively transformed medical practice from an unregulated occupation to a legally recognized profession. The political and legal battles that led up to the decision were unusually bitter—especially among physicians themselves—and the outcome was far from a foregone conclusion.
So-called Regular physicians wanted to impose their own standards on the wide-open medical marketplace in which they and such non-Regulars as Thomsonians, Botanics, Hydropaths, Homeopaths, and Eclectics competed. The Regulars achieved their goal by persuading the state legislature to make it a crime for anyone to practice without a license from the Board of Health, which they controlled. When the high court approved that arrangement—despite constitutional challenges—the licensing precedents established in West Virginia became the bedrock on which the modern American medical structure was built. And those precedents would have profound implications. Thus does Dent, a little-known Supreme Court case, influence how Americans receive health care more than a hundred years after the fact.]]>
Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation Licensed to Practice [Kindle Edition]- File Size: 1304 KB
- Print Length: 225 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1421411423
- Publisher: JHUP; 1 edition (October 15, 2013)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00GBQUB4C
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #781,386 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #68 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Medical eBooks > Physician & Patient > Physicians
In his Metaphysics, Aristotle observed “we understand best those things we see grow from their very beginnings.” Thus one important role of historians is to tell us about those beginnings. In “Licensed to Practice” the distinguished historian James Mohr tells the remarkable story of how the practice of state licensing physicians began.
It is easy to see how the public’s health is under threat if just anyone can hang out a shingle and open a medical practice. Yet, this was precisely the case in the United States throughout much of the 19th century. Few disagreed that only qualified people should be allowed to practice medicine, but controversy erupted over the joint questions of what constitutes being qualified, and who should decide. As one might suspect the controversy included approximately equal parts of science and politics.
Professor Mohr tells the story of how the movement to license physicians grew strong among a minority of physicians in West Virginia who through dint of cleverness and mighty effort convinced the West Virginia legislature to take on this task as a small part of a much greater effort to improve public health. Those whose approach to practicing medicine differed from that which was adopted as required to be licensed understandably objected strenuously. There were a substantial number of individuals, now outsiders to the guild of medicine, who didn’t seem to understand the logic being followed – of course it is always difficult to get someone to understand something if his paycheck requires that he not understand it. Their objections ended up in a legal challenge to the West Virginia statute that ended before the US Supreme Court, which in 1889 (Dent vs.
