Confronting Medical Diploma Mills: State Licensing Boards, Legislatures, and the Limits of Medical Authority in the 1920s.

In the standard story of the rise of professional authority in medicine in the 1920s, state medical licensing boards were partners in a coalition, led by the American Medical Association, to radically improve medical education. Boards obtained state laws that limited admission to licensing examinations to graduates of schools approved by the AMA, thus bringing about the rapid demise of low-quality schools by about 1925. The reality at the state level was quite different, however. Medical examining boards containing homeopaths, eclectics, and sometimes osteopaths could be far from reliable partners. Passing laws to benefit the medical profession was exceedingly difficult and dependent on local medical politics. Through the lens of a major medical diploma mill scandal revealed by a journalist in 1923, this paper examines reform efforts in three states greatly affected by the scandal: Missouri, where the scandal originated, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. In each of these states, graduates of low-quality schools as well as fake doctors from diploma mills were able to take a state examination and practice. This paper argues that the AMA, far from being the major player in the elimination of inadequate schools, could set standards but had to stay on the sidelines.

Writing women into medical history in the 1930s: Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead and "medical women" of the past and present.

Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead (1867­1941), a leader among second-generation women physicians in America, became a pioneer historian of women in medicine in the 1930s. The coalescence of events in her personal life, the declining status of women in medicine, and the growing significance of the new and relatively open field of history of medicine all contributed to this transformation in her career. While she endeavored to become part of the community of male physicians who wrote medical history, her primary identity remained that of a "medical woman." For Hurd-Mead, the history of women in the past not only filled a vital gap in scholarship but served practical ends that she had earlier pursued by other means­those of inspiring and advancing the careers of women physicians of the present day, promoting organizations of women physicians, and advocating for equality of opportunity in the medical profession.

The Thomsonian movement, the regular profession, and the state in antebellum Connecticut: a case study of the repeal of early medical licensing laws.

The Thomsonian movement, founded by Samuel Thomson, was the first major challenge to the therapies and the social and economic standing of the orthodox medical profession in the United States. In the late-eighteenth or early-nineteenth century, many states chartered a state medical society with power to administer a licensing law that placed at least a nominal penalty on practicing without a license. However, in the 1830s and 1840s, under pressure by proponents of the Thomsonian system, almost all legislatures reversed themselves and removed all restrictions on medical practice. This paper reexamines the rise and fall of medical licensing using Connecticut as a case study. Antebellum legislative controversies over licensing have never been described in detail at the state level--where the drama took place--integrating the perspectives of both the medical regulars and Thomsonian botanical physicians, and state politics. Connecticut is a particularly useful case study because, except for New York, its seven-year battle from 1836 to 1842 over the medical society's charter was the most protracted in the country. How was the campaign structured? To what extent did the licensing restrictions matter? What role did the state-level Democratic party play? Thomsonianism in Connecticut, I suggest, was more professionalized and conservative than historians have often portrayed this movement. This account shows that the state's Thomsonian physicians were not anti-professional or opposed to education, but rather used the politics of the antebellum era to challenge the medical law and legitimize themselves as an alternative form of practice.