How did the american medical association (ama) shape health care in the postwar era of the 1950s?

Abstract

Common narratives about the mid-century American medical profession's stunning rise forget a key element: political repression. During the 1940s and 1950s, the American Medical Association (AMA) and its allies sought to eliminate those who questioned American medicine's status quo, in particular opposition to national health insurance (NHI) and condoning of racism within its ranks. One casualty was the Association for Internes and Medical Students (AIMS), which into the 1940s, was the most prominent vehicle for medical student and trainee political organizing in the United Status. This article tells the story of its rapid demise in the era of McCarthyism at the hands of an AMA campaign to besmirch AIMS's name, and in the process, destroy it.

For two decades, during the 1930s and 1940s, activism among American medical students, interns, and residents flourished. It did so through a vehicle called the Association of Internes and Medical Students (AIMS), comprised of chapters housed in medical schools all over the United States. Its geographic center of gravity was along the east coast and Midwest, with chapters located at Yale, New York Medical College, the University of Illinois, Harvard, among others; a number of major hospitals; plus the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and Meharry and Howard, the two major institutions for black medical students in the mid-century United States. In addition, it could count scattered “at-large” members at institutions without chapters.1 Its members sponsored public lectures, lobbied for classes examining social and economic aspects of medical care, and rallied around a number of political causes. AIMS’s most public activity came in the form of a journal, the Interne, which boasted a national circulation of 20,000. Each issue offered a mix of scientific articles, health policy analysis, criticism of typical medical student and intern life, and summaries of AIMS’s annual conventions and campaigns, which included fights for curricular reform, higher pay, and better working conditions, along with vociferous opposition to racism in medical schools and hospitals.2 Its most prominent fight was for national health insurance (NHI) in the years immediately following the Second World War.

But by 1953, the prospects for NHI were dead, and so was AIMS. Within a little more than a half-decade, a once-thriving organization had crumbled, devolving from issuing a monthly journal to eking out thin issues of The Interne, published a year apart, by its end. AIMS’s demise was fueled by two parallel phenomena. The rapid rise of McCarthyism in the early post-WWII years coincided with hard-line national health politics shaped by the American Medical Association (AMA), then at the absolute height of its power. This is the story of how AIMS caught the eye of the AMA, which exploited both vulnerabilities that AIMS had created for itself and the emerging Cold War political zeitgeist of the time. It details the instruments of repression used to destroy AIMS and the latter’s attempts to fight – unsuccessfully, in the end – against them.

Scholarship on McCarthyism and the health sector is strikingly uni-dimensional, centered largely at the level of national legislative politics and the defeat of NHI during the Truman Administration.3 But McCarthyism in medicine went deeper than just NHI. To date, few scholars have moved beyond this NHI focus, most notably Jane Pact Brickman, analyzing the fortunes of early global health activists and members of the Physicians Forum, both of whom were victims of damaging innuendos cast their way.4 I continue this broadening of scope. The crippling of NHI was only one part of a much more multi-faceted tale about the systematic elimination of voices that criticized and questioned the medical profession’s prevailing norms. As scholars such as Landon Storrs and Ellen Schrecker have argued, the silencing and removal of critics, in turn, constricted the horizons of major American institutions, whether the welfare state, the film industry, labor unions, or universities, among others.5 Medicine was no different. And in the era of McCarthyism, AIMS became one of the sector’s biggest political casualties.

SEEING RED: INTERNATIONALISM, ANTI-RACISM, AND NATIONAL HEALTH POLITICS

In the 1930s, two organizations, the Interne Council of America and the Association of Medical Students, focused heavily on the economics of being a young physician, particularly labor conditions and wages during internship and residency. In 1941, they merged into AIMS.6 After World War II, AIMS continued its work on hospital labor but widened its scope as well. And it was three issues in particular –internationalism, anti-racism, and opposition to the medical profession’s prevailing policy positions – that attracted the ire of the AMA.7

As the global Cold War geopolitical alignment hardened between capitalist and communist blocs, AIMS’s stances and activities grew more and more radioactive. Meanwhile, the home front saw the rise of national- and state-level Congressional committees investigating “un-American activities,” along with loyalty boards and required oaths imposed on employees. It was all part of a rapid zeitgeist shift that stigmatized even vaguely leftist political activities as Communist and politically unacceptable. These institutional and cultural developments came to be known as “McCarthyism,” though much of the machinery predated – and lasted beyond – the Senatorial namesake. None of it boded well for AIMS.8

Foremost as a source of troubles was AIMS’s internationalism with like-minded students in other countries. AIMS had cultivated such ties via the International Union of Students (IUS). Formed in 1946 after a World Students’ Congress held in Prague, the IUS consisted of student unions from 62 countries and an executive “secretariat” made up of representatives from the “United States, Britain, France, the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and several other countries.” In addition to providing a means for international student solidarity and exchanges, the IUS also took positions on major international political questions, such as opposition to European colonialism, organized several regional student conferences, and made plans for a regular publication. In these early years, it also adopted an “outward pro-Soviet orientation,” though internally, there existed political heterogeneity within it, not just students with Communist and Soviet loyalties. This factionalism and tension with the Communist-dominated IUS leadership came to a boil in 1948, when Yugoslavia broke away from the USSR to embark upon a program of non-affiliated socialism. In response, the IUS condemned the action and expelled the Yugoslavian student unions, creating further discord with the non-Communist members, most from western Europe and the United States.9

AIMS participated in IUS activities from the latter's inception. The March 1947 Interne contained an effusive write-up of IUS's founding by Bernard Lown, an AIMS representative. In his summary of the organization’s general structure and ideals, Lown offered plenty of ammunition for anti-communists’ scrutiny in the next few years, as the Cold War geopolitical alignment hardened. For one, AIMS explicitly linked itself to an Eastern bloc nation, when Lown announced that student exchanges between Britain and Czechoslovakia had already taken place.10 AIMS was helping lay the groundwork for IUS's “Medical Commission,” which organized supply drives to countries short of medical texts and equipment and arranged for students to serve residencies in different countries.11 In another Interne issue that appeared shortly afterwards, an article referred to AIMS's past as “consciously anti-Nazi and anti-fascist” and prior leaders’ fundraising “to help the brave Spanish people in their war against Franco,” a reference to the defeat of Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascist Spain.12 The Interne also promoted an upcoming World Youth Festival in Prague, called in conjunction with the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY), another organization with a heavy Communist presence, according to the scholar Philip Altbach.13

AIMS’s anti-racism was as prominent and aggressive as its internationalism. AIMS members persistently highlighted racial discrimination in medicine. At its 1947 national convention, AIMS “publicly expressed serious concern,” as related in an Interne dispatch, “over the continued failure of the medical profession to root out discrimination from its midst.”14 It was a thinly veiled criticism of the AMA's unwillingness to order de-segregation of its state- and local-level medical societies in the South, a policy that would not end until the mid-1960s.15 Programmatically, AIMS compiled reports on the racial composition of the profession at all levels, especially in medical schools, and held meetings on discrimination in medicine in conjunction with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). “The Negro physician is hampered in his attempt to acquire essential post graduate training because of proscription of Negro membership by the local Medical Society as is practiced throughout the South, as well as strict segregation in teaching institutions,” wrote Quentin Young, an AIMS member involved in its Committee Against Discrimination.16 At the international level, IUS resolutions called for “students to fight against discrimination in education, against dissemination of pseudo-scientific theories of racial superiority, and the elimination of fascist falsifications from science.” And a commission set up by IUS was investigating “fascist ideology” in Japanese and German universities.17

In the 1930s, organizations on the left, especially the Communist Party, had thrown themselves into the vanguard of civil rights and anti-fascist organizing as other political entities initially remained silent. One of the most high-profile examples came when the Communist Party supported the legal defense of the Scottsboro Boys, nine African-American men falsely accused of raping two white women.18 And during the Great Depression, the Party also became active in tenant struggles around Harlem.19 But the involvement of the Party in these efforts quickly stigmatized civil rights activity more broadly. That was the case, too, for opposition to fascism abroad; the Communist Party was represented heavily in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade’s ranks and other American solidarity groups that fought unsuccessfully in Spain against Franco's fascist forces.20 Upon his return, the physician Edward Barsky, a Lincoln Brigader who led its medical unit, lost his ability to practice in 1951 after a licensing board found him guilty of “moral turpitude.” Barsky’s travails were rooted in his affiliations with the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, a solidarity group to anti-Franco Republican forces that had appeared on an Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations.21 It was an example of how, after World War II, the language of anti-racism and anti-fascism, invoked prominently by AIMS, carried a metonymic effect, linking them directly to sympathy for Communism.

But it was AIMS’s direct attacks on the AMA and its policies that thrust it most centrally into the latter’s sights. In the same issue where AIMS declared a link to the IUS, the Interne published “A Pernicious Resolution.” The article criticized an AMA resolution that called for limiting intern salaries, ostensibly so they would not reach high enough level to become the primary factor by which a medical student considered a desired placement. AIMS saw the resolution as a transparent cost-cutting measure that would “please many short-sighted hospital administrators, intent only on balancing budgets.”22 Most of “A Pernicious Resolution,” however, retained a civil tone. It concluded, for example, by “respectfully suggest[ing]” a higher salary scale that “would enable all graduates, irrespective of financial status, to apply for the educationally most desirable positions.”23

The most consequential AIMS position, however, took place during the 1948 AIMS convention. There, the “most significant event,” in the estimation of an Interne correspondent, was AIMS's decision to support national health insurance.24 But AIMS’s timing could not have been worse. In 1948, when President Truman assumed his first full term and vowed to make NHI one of his policy priorities, the NHI congressional debates were at their height. And so was the AMA’s fierce campaign against proponents of NHI, a policy it painted bluntly as a Communist scheme. AIMS would feel the campaign’s effects right away.

FIRST SHOTS: AIMS AND THE AMA

Up to 1948, AIMS had maintained civil relations with the AMA. The previous year, the Interne praised AMA “for a most exciting and stimulating medical convention, fittingly honoring its first 100 years.”25 It wasn't until AIMS’s NHI position that the AMA set its sights on sullying AIMS. In an AMA convention speech, for example, AMA lobbyist Clem Whitaker stated that “the fight that American medicine is waging is a fundamental struggle against governmental domination… The trend toward State-ism in America has become unmistakable…. It is only a short step from the ‘Welfare State’ to the ‘Total State,’ which taxes the wage earner into government enslavement, which stamps out incentive and soon crushes individual liberty.”26 These histrionic attacks greeted public figures who supported NHI, implicitly linking them to centralized Soviet-style government against which the American medical profession stood as a counterpoint.

In June 1948, it was AIMS’s turn. The AMA ordered its Reference Committee in Medical Education to investigate AIMS “as to facts, tendencies, affiliations and objectives.” AIMS was “exhibiting communistic tendencies” and allegedly advocated “strikes that are upsetting to proper medical education.” By contrast, “the American medical profession” stood “opposed universally to any organization which advocates the overthrow of the United States government by force and violence,” a juxtaposition that threatened to stain AIMS’s public image given the acceleration of McCarthyist sensibilities. JAMA reprinted its resolution, ensuring it was seen by about 100,000 subscribers, more than “the next six medical periodicals combined.”27

Faced with this new scrutiny, AIMS did not lay low. Indeed, it did the exact opposite. In the March 1949 Interne, AIMS printed a letter, signed by a number of physicians, that protested a new $25 fee levied upon all AMA members. The letter suggested that such fees might really go towards “propaganda and legislative lobbying instead of developing a comprehensive medical program.” If the AMA took such an action, AIMS charged, it would “add to the already firmly rooted suspicion that its objectives are primarily economic and selfish and will further weaken its standing as an altruistic agency.” The letter “urge[d] all physicians with a sense of responsibility for the future of American medicine to register their protest.” In remarks book-ending this unflattering characterization of the AMA, AIMS took no explicit stand on the dues issue, and only promised to hold “extensive discussions” about it in the future. But one could infer strained relations with the AMA based on AIMS’s publication of a lengthy anti-AMA letter in its entirety. Doing so was “of such importance,” AIMS explained, because it represented “a challenge not only to the AMA but to the whole profession.”28

AIMS also countered the AMA’s recent statements against the organization, characterizing the AMA as “near hysterical” and its new investigation as predicated on an “undemocratic basis.”29 At a summary of an AIMS-sponsored 1949 conference on “Discrimination and Academic Freedom,” the references to the AMA were obvious:

At the present time the AIMS is being subjected to unprincipled attacks which have at their basis the intent to frighten away medical students and internes from an organization which fights for their benefit and whose principles are their own. The method of course is to label AIMS subversive. But who indeed is subversive, an organization which labels, smears and refuses to follow any pattern of democratic inquiry or an organization which has always been open in its methods and objectives and whose course is determined not by any executive decision but by democratic processes at its annual convention?30

As the tensions with the AMA heated up, AIMS adopted novel rhetorical strategies to defend itself. It portrayed the organization as one that adhered to scientific ideals of “objectivity, transparency, and fair mindedness.” AIMS “always offered free access to its policies, principles, and actions.” It described its response to the AMA’s resolution as “calm, dignified, and scientific,” written only “after thorough deliberation.”31 Far from deviating from the values of the scientific and medical community, AIMS seemed to be arguing, it was proudly adhering to them.

AIMS continued to tap professional authority, but relations with the AMA worsened. In early 1949, for example, the AMA published a letter that criticized AIMS’s pro-NHI stance and expressed concern that AIMS’s views might be construed as representative of all medical students and internes. The AMA prefaced the letter by dismissing AIMS as a marginal organization that claimed to speak for all. It then accused AIMS of refusing to publish an anti-NHI letter in the Interne. In a response printed in JAMA soon afterwards, Interne editor William Ruberman denied that AIMS had ever portrayed itself as speaking for all. He also denied that AIMS wished to stifle the voices of critics and pointed to an anti-NHI letter that AIMS had in fact published from some non-AIMS medical students at the University of Arkansas, who had argued that NHI “would be detrimental not only to the medical profession and the health of the people in the United States but also to the democratic ideals upon which our government is founded.”32 By allowing for this spectrum of viewpoints on NHI, AIMS and the Interne had upheld “scientific objectivity,” in Ruberman’s words, in its approach to NHI. That stood in sharp contrast to the conduct of the AMA, which AIMS rebuked harshly at the end of its letter, describing it as an organization typified by a “prejudiced, unscientific attitude,” one that “pervade[d] the present ‘investigation’ of the Association of Internes and Medical Students by the American Medical Association.” “Not once,” it continued, “has the organization [AIMS] or any of its officers been called on to answer any of the charges made against it.”33 The AMA’s political conduct, in other words, was also un-scientific, antithetical to sober inquiry, professionally unbecoming.

The tension with the AMA intensified, and so did AIMS's vulnerabilities. Anti-communist fervor in the country was growing, but AIMS did not sever its ties with the IUS. In 1949, Sheppard Thierman, an intern at New York City’s Kings County Hospital, who also served as AIMS's International Vice President, participated in an IUS-backed tour of France, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. So did 15 other AIMS members. Some then attended the annual IUS World Youth Festival in Budapest, and Thierman's very positive account of his travels appeared in the Interne.34

At the same time, questions arose within AIMS about the IUS affiliation. In May of 1948, AIMS resolved to re-affiliate with the IUS. But it added that it did “not agree with every action taken” by IUS. AIMS would restrict itself to “those activities that are within the proper scope of our Association, which our membership has delineated; we participate within the general framework of the IUS. We do not participate in those phases of the program of the IUS… not within the province of our mandate.” This statement was a mouthful, and it hardly ended the debate over the relationship. Among AIMS's national leaders, the IUS question loomed throughout the rest of the year. In June 1949, AIMS's National Executive Council passed another resolution stating that it would involve itself only in “political activities” if they were necessary to advance “the needs and problems of students,” AIMS’s “primary basis for international student activity.”35 With these new caveats, Halstead Holman, a former AIMS President, attended the IUS's Executive Council, held in Bulgaria in September 1949. Holman returned an enthusiastic report to the AIMS leadership, reporting many students, especially from Eastern Europe and Vietnam, had thanked him for AIMS's shipments of medical books and supplies. “The IUS program is more clear and positive than ever before,” he concluded.36

But doubts persisted among AIMS chapters, and Holman reported “heightened anti-IUS feeling” among them. Two other AIMS leaders, Lewis Rowland and Bert Lown, reported that the affiliation was creating “serious cleavages within the organization” and that in at least one major chapter, Columbia's, it was threatening to “wreck all activity.37 He himself felt the sentiment unjustified. AIMS simply needed to do a better job, he wrote to AIMS President Lewis Rowland, of explaining to its members what exactly the IUS did while assuring them that there was nothing for chapters to fear. And further, if AIMS cut IUS ties, in Holman’s view, it would amount to caving into “an incendiary internal red-scare” and would undercut AIMS's political principles. “Once we admit the validity of red-baiting on one issue, we must admit it on another,” Holman elaborated.38 But Holman's position ultimately did not prevail at the 1949 AIMS annual convention held late in the year. Members chose to disaffiliate, citing “attacks the organization was sustaining” as a result.39 It all came too late.

ESCALATION: TURNING THE SCREWS ON AIMS

Over the next year, the AIMS-AMA friction transformed from one primarily played out in print to one that inflicted real organizational damage. Just weeks after an annual convention, the first of many rapid disasters came for AIMS’s public image. In January of 1950, a JAMA commentary belittled AIMS's pro-NHI stance and call for higher intern wages. It re-reminded readers that AIMS had “been accused of Communistic affiliations” by the AMA. And while mentioning AIMS's break from IUS, it suggested that the stigma would linger, concluding that while AIMS members were “well meaning persons,” “their membership in an organization which cooperated with the International Union of Students will leave their sincerity and loyalty open to question by discerning critics.”40

Damaging as the JAMA piece was, it paled in comparison to the impact of an article two months later in the AMA-sympathetic journal Medical Economics. Provocatively entitled “Leftist Minority Woos Future Doctors,” it devoted nine pages to AIMS's recent activities, political positions, and leaders. Photographs of the last World Youth and Student Festival in Budapest adorned its first two pages. One featured AIMS’s Sheppard Thierman marching “in gala parade at Communist-sponsored World Youth and Student Festival.” Another caption noted the words of the plaque on the convention hall, “Under the banner of Lenin, under the leadership of Stalin – forward to the victory of Communism!” A page-length inset listing AIMS's “Web of Affiliations” made for striking visual effect. It purported to list organizations that IUS and AIMS officers had allegedly “sponsored” or “participated [in]” and that were “found to be Communist or Communist-front” by the Attorney General or HUAC.41 Most, including the IUS, in fact had only received passing mention in HUAC reports, and only a few, the American League for Peace and Democracy, the Civil Rights Congress, and JAFRC, had actually appeared on the Attorney General’s list.42

But in the age of McCarthyism, insinuating guilt by any level of association with alleged Communists (or sympathizers) was commonplace. Medical Economics was no different with its charge that AIMS possessed an “affinity for the infra-Red side of the political spectrum.”43 Besides IUS, the Interne had in 1946 “beat the drum” for the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, an organization that had fought for social welfare expansion and civil rights in the Jim Crow South. In 1947, AIMS had “appealed for medical supplies for China” on behalf of the China Aid Council, part of the American League for Peace and Democracy. Walter Lear, a former national executive secretary, had sponsored a 1946 Win the Peace conference that had fallen under political question. And Lewis Rowland, it claimed, had performed a similar function at a 1949 Bill of Rights Conference. With each example, AIMS entered further into a dragnet in which all were tainted as Communist sympathizers, whatever their actual ideological views. In reality, as the private memoranda over the IUS suggested, AIMS leaders were always resolute about limiting their IUS activities to those advancing the “needs and problems of students” in medicine and not adopting political planks of IUS outside this scope. But Medical Economics did not interrogate the explicit nature of named AIMS officers’ connections with listed groups, nor whether they even occurred under AIMS auspices.44 That these connections were principally medical in nature was not out of the question. Two of the activities for which Medical Economics spotlighted the Interne, after all, had been to address health needs of the American South and of China.45

Though its overall slant was against AIMS, the Medical Economics article did contain a couple favorable items. It noted, though without proportional emphasis, that only eight of twenty-seven Interne editorial members were affiliated with the listed groups. AIMS’s anti-discrimination campaigns also received favorable mention, with Medical Economics noting that they had received “plaudits from many quarters.”46 A medical administrator complaint about AIMS members’ belligerence and disruptive presence stood alongside praise from another who described them as “doing an intelligent job of investigating and presenting the facts.”47 And surprisingly, there was also virtually nothing critical about AIMS’s pro-NHI stance, in stark contrast to some of the attacks that NHI advocates faced in other venues, including JAMA. But the amount of space devoted to the political affiliations dwarfed these positive items.

AIMS reacted critically to the Medical Economics piece. In a letter responding to galley proofs, incoming AIMS President James Foulks, a Columbia University medical student, accused the publication of decontextualizing quotations, not specifying the nature of the affiliations, and using “innuendo and unsubstantiated hearsay.” Foulks complained also of having too little time to issue a response or corrections to Medical Economics and that the publication should have gotten its story straight in the first place. He disavowed all quotations featured in the article from AIMS members, which would have included his own, stating that AIMS’s offices authorized none of them.48 “We feel that your present article does not deserve to find its way into print in any respectable journal,” he finished.49 After the actual article appeared, the Interne published similar criticisms. It accurately chided Medical Economics for lifting statements from AIMS publications out of context by comparing them to fuller text. And it criticized the use of anonymous comments, too, about the organization.

But “Medical Economics: A Drama in Three Parts” contained its share of evasions as well. While underscoring the point that most of the AIMS affiliations to the listed groups were either inconsequential or of a specific medical nature unspecified by the article, the article also avoided the question by drawing a distinction between group and individual ties. AIMS officers involved in certain activities were not acting on behalf of the organization, according to this logic, even though Sheppard Thierman’s piece on the World Youth Festival had been published in the Interne.50

A month later, the situation grew even worse for AIMS when the AMA released the results of its investigation. Unlike its previous JAMA dispatches, the Council on Medical Education and Hospitals report was more tonally restrained. It summarized accurately the major activities of AIMS before outlining alleged links to subversive groups, especially the IUS. Much like the Medical Economics article, the Council daisy-chained the IUS to the World Federation of Democratic Youth, in turn linked to the American Youth for Democracy, the latter of which the Attorney General officially categorized as subversive.51 Elsewhere, the report contained a reference to a 1938 issue of something called the Medical Center Worker, purportedly published by the “Communist Party Unit” of Columbia University’s Medical Center, which had encouraged students to join AIMS. Shortly before its report, the AMA had also circulated copies of the Medical Economics article to interns across the country.52

Like the Medical Economics article, however, the AMA’s report was not completely one-sided. It noted, for example, that the Interne sometimes published writings by AMA officials. At the same time, the Interne allegedly carried pieces by those “affiliated with organizations and institutions that have been cited as Communist fronts or which have been declared subversive by the Department of Justice.” Some sympathetic medical school administrators contacted by the Committee “spoke very favorably” about AIMS chapters, but others, the Council reported, stated that “the organization was distinctly leftist, that the propriety of certain of its tactics was open to question and that the organization was active in sponsoring political projects far removed” from those typical of a medical student organization. The AMA concluded that “the great majority” who joined the organization did so out of sincere interest in “problems of legitimate” concern to them, and that no government entity or figure had characterized it as subversive. But it also determined that AIMS possessed “a general reputation of being a left wing organization,” citing the 1938 Columbia University Medical Center document and AIMS’s associations (of varying degrees) to the IUS and the American Youth for Democracy. The AMA’s report recommended that the organization inform potential AIMS members of its left-wing reputation and concluded that it could not “lend its support to the activities of the Association of Internes and Medical Students as presently constituted.”53

The Council’s Report bore a conspicuous similarity to the Medical Economics article that the AMA had circulated. It raised questions about the degree to which their authorship was connected. Versions of one anecdote, for instance, appeared in both. It concerned the experiences of a non-AIMS American medical student who, while attending a 1946 International Clinical Teaching Congress, was asked by the European delegates whether all American students were as “Red-minded” (Medical Economics) or “Communistic” (JAMA) as the AIMS delegates. Medical Economics provided no source for the anecdote, but JAMA did, printing a large excerpt from a letter written by the student in question.54 This suggested that Medical Economics had received some information for its article from the AMA beforehand. Both also referred to interviews with deans who provided both positive and negative assessments of the group. Thematically, the two pieces also focused most heavily on the IUS affiliation, though Medical Economics identified several other affiliations.

Even if the AMA had not provided information to Medical Economics, it certainly made use of the article. In April 1950, shortly before its own report’s release, the AMA circulated copies of the Medical Economics piece to interns across the country. This distribution followed a February meeting during which AMA leaders divulged that they had found nothing to indicate AIMS itself engaged in “subversive” or “disloyal” activities. At the same time, the AMA requested that AIMS leaders keep this finding a secret until the release of the official AMA report. When the AMA mailed out the Medical Economics piece, it had, in AIMS’s view, not only “put itself in the position of endorsing the many lies and distortions contained therein,” but had also committed a “further breach of confidence” that “reflect[ed] dishonor upon the organization and the profession.” Here, AIMS again invoked professionalism against the AMA, the mainstream face of the profession.55

Whatever the connection between the Medical Economics article and the Council’s report, the AMA appended an AIMS response to it, a larger version of which appeared in the Interne. Both AIMS replies accused the AMA of using the “vague catch-all phrase” of “left-wing” and predicating it primarily on the comments of scattered medical deans, cherry-picked Interne articles by certain authors, the obscure 1938 Columbia Medical Center newsletter, and the involvement with IUS, a circumscribed relationship that it claimed the AMA had failed to articulate in much detail. On IUS, AIMS had always “restricted its participation to activities consonant with its own constitution” and “recognized from the beginning that the program of the IUS was broader,” something underscored by the private internal debates over AIMS and IUS. AIMS argued that its stances on health policy, particularly concerning the NHI question, higher interne salaries, and racial discrimination within the profession, were motives behind the AMA’s attack. The stakes ultimately went beyond AIMS itself. The AMA’s investigation was painted as an attack on the medical profession more generally, one that struck “right at the heart of the freedom of the profession” and represented “a blow to the dignity of a profession which has always based itself on freedom of inquiry.” No one, it concluded in its Interne piece, “can feel more secure, rather all will have [been] lost, if this continues any further.”56

DEFEAT: AIMS'S TAILSPIN

Whatever the AMA’s motives, AIMS's decline was propitious. As the events unfolded, at least one AIMS leader suffered severe repercussions. On February 24, 1950, Sheppard Thierman met with the Kings County Hospital’s Medical Board, which after interviewing him about his political views, decided to dismiss him. Months later, Marcus Kogel, New York City’s Commissioner of Hospitals, would announce that Thierman had “obtain[ed] a leave of absence under ‘false pretenses,’” wrongly used the Kings County name on stationery, and displayed “strong Communist tendencies.” Several parties protested Kogel, including part of the Kings County house staff, New York City councilman Stanley Isaacs, and the Physicians Forum, a left-leaning group of older physicians. The Forum’s resolution declared, as had and would others, that “the only measure of a physician’s fitness is his professional ability and integrity.”

But these efforts failed completely. To a group of protesting Kings County internes meeting with him in his office, Kogel announced that Thierman was “fired and remains fired.” Additionally, any “active Communist” would experience a similar fate. “I don’t think our institutions should be used for training persons seeking to overthrow the government,” Kogel explained. After his dismissal, Thierman faced additional problems. A couple years later, following an honorable discharge from the army for service in the Korean War, Thierman in April 1953 received a court martial accusing him of CP membership and “knowingly” concealing on a loyalty oath. The case received enormous publicity in nationally read newspapers. That same year, Thierman was cleared in August on a technicality that distinguished between actual CP membership and a mere application for it, which Thierman had admitted to filing.57

Organizationally, AIMS’s woes were amplified on a number of fronts. Shortly after its report, the AMA called for the creation of a Student American Medical Association (SAMA) as an alternative to AIMS.58 In less than a year, SAMA chapters began to appear across the country. Will Osibin of Meharry Medical College’s AIMS chapter wrote to James Foulks about the “apathy” among fellow members in the face of SAMA’s new presence. The AIMS members had voted to close the chapter, he wrote, but never got around to writing a resolution enacting it. But this was actually fortunate, wrote Osibin, who said he and others planned to revive the chapter, having seen the “true light” of SAMA.59

Meanwhile, to any reader of the Interne, the effects of the Medical Economics article and the AMA’s report were glaringly obvious. In the middle of 1950, AIMS suspended publication without explanation. Behind the scenes, AIMS organizational secretary Charlie Nugent wrote to ex-National Executive Secretary Walter Lear: “I suppose you know by now that the Interne is through. Shortly after the report of the AMA Council on AIMS appeared in the JAMA we lost every advertiser with the exception of the US Army recruiting service.”60 Nugent continued by adding the AMA’s report was just the culmination of an onslaught, writing that “there were so many precipitating incidents, mainly from the AMA, that I am not sure that the Council report was of overwhelming importance in the final withdrawals.”61 Nugent's speculation that AIMS’s decline was long underway was probably correct. Medical Economics had noted, not without a hint of glee, the Interne's difficulties with financing.

AIMS tried to carry on in a crippled state. A much thinner replacement to the Interne, without advertisements, appeared in the summer of 1950. AIMS Pulse carried an editorial that reflected a definite awareness of the political climate. “The final limits of this kind of attack are unfortunately still out of sight,” it read, and then elaborated in what turned out to be a near-final salvo:

We believe internes should receive adequate compensation for their services; we believe that discriminatory practices do not belong in medicine; we believe that free scientific inquiry must be preserved; we believe that visiting and consulting with students and physicians the world over is the method, par excellence, for achieving understanding; we believe that many people in our country cannot obtain the benefits of modern medicine, and we believe that this should be corrected. These are the things for which the AIMS is dedicated to work. These are the things for which we are threatened.62

At least two issues of Pulse were published, but it disappeared by spring of 1951, when AIMS Announces, another publication with even cruder typeface and production values arose from the University of Chicago chapter. Its second issue declared: “Midst the stentorian wheezes of the AMA and the crepitant rales of its epicene embryo, the SAMA, AIMS Announces shall continue as the last remaining vestige of the free press.”63 The Interne returned in September of 1951, but no other issues appeared that year.64 Finally, almost a year later, AIMS published another issue. After that, another Interne never appeared again. In these final months, AIMS held a three-day convention in December 1951, where it denounced “the slander of people and organizations‚ based on the pernicious doctrine of guilt by association‚ directed to the purpose of regimenting American thought and action.” It was a charged reference to AIMS and the AMA after 1948.

Many AIMS alumni continued to suffer. Three years later, in 1954, a physician named Thomas Perry appeared before the California Legislature’s Senate Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities. Perry was asked of his past AIMS membership. Later, the ex-President of the Los Angeles County Medical Association, Lewis Alesen, detailed AIMS’s activities. To help jog his memory, Alesen opened a copy of Medical Economics’ “Leftist Minority Woos Future Doctors” and read some of its content. The public association of his name with AIMS sullied Perry, but for AIMS itself, this ceased to matter. By then, the organization had been long dead.65

BURIED ALIVE: THE FALL AND RISE OF STUDENT HEALTH ACTIVISM

By the mid-20th-century, the medical profession stood at the height of its powers. Its transformation into the guild of all guilds was facilitated by hard limits on the number of medical schools in the country, the rise of medical licensing boards, the explosion of government spending on medical research, and the sound defeat of national health insurance.66 The medical profession of this era has been used in social science case studies as an example of the ultimate institution that hordes resources and powers for its members, then undertakes a process of “social closure” to maintain exclusivity, power, and prestige.67 But this traditional narrative is missing one critical element: political repression. During what Landon Storrs has called “the second Red Scare,” the medical profession aligned itself with the broader early Cold War political imperatives of the time and actively neutralized dissent within the profession, attacking individuals and organizations who questioned its larger policy goals. Like McCarthyism more broadly, these actions, to borrow Storrs’s words, “constricted the flow of people and ideas” in the medical profession.68 AIMS died because of this effort.69

AIMS’s rapid fall underscores how asymmetries of economic power affect the ability of activists to carry on their work. As scholars such as Kim Phillips-Fein and Nancy MacLean have demonstrated, defenders of the status quo are frequently deep-pocketed and well-resourced, far more so than those who challenge them.70 That was clear in the case of AIMS, sustained largely through the sale of ads in the Interne and up against the AMA’s pulpits. When McCarthyist accusations led to withdrawal of advertisers, AIMS promptly wilted. The AIMS episode demonstrates, too, the power that monied private entities – not just governments – have to facilitate political repression: what might be called private McCarthyism.

The inability to fully register the sharp anti-communist tilt of larger public discourse was another critical part of AIMS’s downfall. AIMS was largely unaware of the IUS affiliation’s potential ramifications until the AMA attacked it publicly and repeatedly. By that time, AIMS was stuck in a reactive position, never controlling how others characterized it or the terms of debate. This does not mean AIMS should have disbanded or avoided the IUS connection earlier. IUS, after all, was a chief vehicle for uniting left-leaning students around the globe. Rather, AIMS could have strategically anticipated attacks centered around the IUS affiliation. It might then have delineated publicly the extent of its IUS affiliation, stressing its restriction to activities within the scope of AIMS’s mission, as it would later put it in defense. Activists cannot discount taking stock of larger discursive context and how actions and associations might be read by others. That is doubly so in the era of digital communication, where all sorts of falsehoods, half-truths, and scurrilous accusations can be spread rapidly and loudly.

As McCarthyism began to ebb, however, AIMS alumni moved on to productive endeavors elsewhere. Bernard Lown, who had attended the founding IUS meeting, eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for his role in the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Lewis Rowland became a professor of neurology at Columbia University and served as the chief editor of Neurology, a flagship journal for that field. Ruth Bleier, once AIMS’s Executive Secretary, pioneered the feminist critique of medicine and science’s biases, in addition to numerous contributions to medical science. One could go down The Interne masthead and find plenty of similar stories.

AIMS’s biggest legacy, perhaps, was intergenerational. In the 1960s, a restless and politically active medical student at the University of Southern California learned about AIMS by chance. His name was Bill Bronston, and inspired by old issues of the Interne that some AIMS alumni had given him, he and others eventually created the Student Health Organizations (SHO), a similar network of activists at campuses across the country. He had, he related decades later, “accidentally discovered this progressive AIMS tendency and wanted to reinstill it and felt absolutely no barrier.”71 Its former ranks were now “now in leading positions all over the United States in schools of public health and preventive medicine, and infectious disease.” For Bronston, AIMS’s heritage was one he and his peers could build on, an absolute jolt for those who felt alienated and stultified in medical school as the civil rights and another nascent student movement were ascending around them. As he put it, AIMS responded to something: “this vacuum, there was this starvation from my peers to suck meaning, to get a sense and reassert the romance of why they came into medicine.”72

SHO’s run lasted about a half-decade before the organization imploded from infighting. But on a number of campuses, it spurred major reforms around curricular reform and institutional outreach to marginalized populations. SHO alumni spread throughout the ranks of the health sector, much as AIMS ones did. SHO also forced the hand of the Student American Medical Association (SAMA), created by the AMA in response to AIMS. In response to SHO, SAMA members pushed to become an independent organization, free from AMA political constraints, in 1967. It changed its name to the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) in 1975.73 The connective tissue running through AIMS, SHO, and AMSA affirms Robert Harmon’s 1978 argument – made in the thicket of revived resident organizing in the 1970s – that the practice of labor organizing among young physicians stretched back much longer than the campaigns mounted at the time he wrote. But as seen here, AIMS and its descendants’ activities ran a much wider gamut.

In our current era, the past half-decade has seen medical students throw themselves into social justice issues, most memorably in “White Coat Die-Ins” calling attention to police brutality.74 Many did so as AMSA members, though almost none knew of its roots in AIMS. This long lineage highlights the folly of declaring political “failure” prematurely. AIMS had an afterlife. It did not survive. Yet it survived.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Kathleen Bachynski, Lundy Braun, Arlene Shaner, Yoka Tomita, and Eric Dillalogue for comments and help preparing this manuscript. Henry Farrill provided an especially close reading of an early draft.

Footnotes

1

I based these characterizations on a review of AIMS correspondence, plus the mastheads in issues of The Interne, its publication. On geographic centers of gravity, my conclusion comes from Interne material like the following: “regional chairmen” positions of the “Southern, Rocky Mountain, Pacific Coast, and North Central” sub-divisions were “to be designated,” whereas the others were filled, according to a February 1949 issue of The Interne. See Interne: Journal of the Association of Internes and Medical Students 15, no. 2 (February 1949) [hereafter referred to as Interne]; Will Osibin to James Foulks, 15 May 1951 in Papers of Association of Internes and Medical Students (AIMS) (unprocessed), Walter J. Lear Collection [unprocessed], Kislak Center for Special Collections, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA [hereafter referred to as AIMS Papers].

Walter Lear was an archivist, activist, and historian who amassed an enormous collection of materials on health activism. He transferred the entire collection to the University of Pennsylvania, though much of it remains unprocessed. I have retained digital copies of all unprocessed material cited here. In addition to these activities, Lear was both a physician and a public health official, serving in key roles at both the city (Philadelphia) and state levels, and was openly gay in 1975 during an era of deep homophobia in both the American public health professions and broader society. This article would not have been possible without his energy and efforts. For more on Lear, see John F. Morrison, “Walter J. Lear, Health Official, Activist,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 7, 2010.

2

Thomas Perry and De Forest Ely, “AIMS, Past, Present and Future: Part 2,” Interne: Journal of the Association of Internes and Medical Students 13, no. 4 (April 1947); “Postwar Medicine: Study Guide and Bibliography — Association of Interns and Medical Students,” ca. late 1940s in Series II: Subject Files, Box: "A-Bi," Folder "Association of Internes and Medical Students," Papers of Ernest Philip Boas in American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA [hereafter referred to as Boas Papers]; “Association of Internes and Medical Students,” brochure, 1949 (from context) in Box 26, Folder 6, Papers of Bernard Lown, Center for the History of Medicine, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA [hereafter referred to as Lown Papers]; “Proceedings, A.I.M.S. Convention,” December 1947, Box 26, Folder 6, Lown Papers; AIMS New York House Staff Council, “Adequate Salaries for Internes Prepared for the Board of Estimate of New York City,” ca. mid-to-late 1940s (from context), Box 26, Folder 2, Lown Papers.

3

On the NHI battle, see Colin Gordon, Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health Care in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 221-23; Jill Quadagno, One Nation: Uninsured: Why the U.S. Has No National Health Insurance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 34-43; Monte M. Poen, Harry S. Truman versus the Medical Lobby: The Genesis of Medicare (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979); Rosemary Stevens, American Medicine and the Public Interest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998 [1971]), 186-94, 272-77; Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 235-89. On the AMA specifically, see Frank Campion, The AMA and U.S. Health Policy Since 1940 (Chicago: American Medical Association, 1984), 138-76; Howard Wolinksy and Tom Brune, The Serpent and the Staff: The Unhealthy Politics of the American Medical Association (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994), 15-43.

4

Jane Pacht Brickman, “‘Medical McCarthyism’: The Physicians Forum and the Cold War,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 49, no. 3 (July 1994), 380-418; Brickman, “Medical McCarthyism and the Punishment of Internationalist Physicians in the United States” in Theodore Brown and Anne-Emmanuelle Birn, eds., Comrades in Health: U.S. Health Internationalists, Abroad and at Home (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 82-100.

5

Landon Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998).

6

“Association of Internes and Medical Students,” brochure, 1949 in AIMS Papers; Robert G. Harmon, “Intern and Resident Organizations in the United States: 1934-1977,” Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 56, no. 4 (1978): 503-4.

7

“AIMS Program of the Association of Internes and Medical Students,” ca. late 1940s (from context), Papers of AIMS, Lear Collection.

8

On the federal loyalty program, see Storrs, The Second Red Scare; Eleanor Bontecou, The Federal Loyalty-Security Program (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1953); Robert Justin Goldstein, American Blacklist: The Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008). On McCarthyism generally, see Schrecker, Many are the Crimes; Stanley Kutler, The American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); David Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York: Free Press, 1983).

9

Philip G. Altbach, “The International Student Movement,” Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 1 (1970), 162-64.

10

Bernard Lown, “The International Union of Students,” Interne 13, no. 3 (March 1947), 132-33; “The International Union of Students and the Association of Internes and Medical Students,” Box 26, Folder 2, Lown Papers; Beatrice Kass to “Chapter Chairman,” 22 October 1949, Box 26, Folder 2, Lown Papers.

11

Lown, “The International Union of Students,” Interne 13, no. 3 (March 1947), 132-33.

12

Thomas Perry and De Forest Ely, “AIMS, Past, Present and Future: Part 2,” Interne 13, no. 4 (April 1947), 173-78.

13

“Call to American Students to the World Youth Festival,” Interne 13, no. 5 (May 1947), 230-31; Altbach, “The Internatioanl Student Movement,” 158 and Altbach, “The International Student Movement” Comparative Education Review 8, no. 2 (October 1964), 132.

14

Perry and Ely, “AIMS, Past, Present and Future: Conclusion,” Interne 13, no. 5 (May 1947), 223.

15

On segregation within the AMA, see “A.M.A. 1966 Action on Discrimination,” Journal of the National Medical Association 58, no. 5 (1966), 383; Gordon, 173; and David B. Smith, Health Care Divided: Race and Healing a Nation (Ann Arbor: Michigan, 1999), 68-74.

16

“Report of the Conference of Discrimination in Professional Education,” 1949 in AIMS Papers; AIMS Committee Against Discrimination, “Discrimination in Medicine: A Report,” 1950 in AIMS Papers, Lear Collection; Quentin Young, “National Committee Against Discrimination – AIMS. Information Bulletin #1,” 1950 in AIMS Papers.

17

Lown, “The International Union of Students,” 132-33.

18

Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1990), ch. 4.

19

Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983).

20

Peter N. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Kelley, “This Ain’t Ethiopia But It’ll Do: African Americans and the Spanish Civil War” in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working-Class (New York: Free Press, 1994); Robert Rosenstone, Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War (New York: Pegasus, 1969); Arthur Landis, The Abraham Lincoln Brigade (New York: Citadel Press, 1967).

21

Barsky v. Board of Regents, 347 U.S. 442 (1954); Philip Deery, Red Apple: Communism and McCarthyism in Cold War New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), ch. 1; Adam Hochschild, Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), 122-24.

22

“Editorial: A Pernicious Resolution,” Interne 13, no. 3 (March 1947), 124, 140.

23

Ibid.

24

William Ruberman, “Report on AIMS Convention, 1948,” Interne 15, no. 2 (February 1949), 45-6.

25

“An Editorial: Centennial Convention – A.M.A.,” Interne 13, no. 7 (July 1947), 315.

26

Clem Whitaker quoted in Quadagno, 35.

27

“Resolution on Association of Interns [sic] and Medical Students,” JAMA 137, no. 10 (July 1948), 887; “Report of Reference Committee on Hygiene and Public Health,” JAMA 137, no. 17 (December 1948), 1236. I have found no evidence to suggest that AIMS ever advocated strikes as it campaigned for higher salaries and working conditions. On circulation figures, see Campion, 115.

28

“The Medical Profession and Its Responsibility: A Challenge,” Interne 15, no. 3 (March 1949), 73, 84.

29

Ruberman, “Report on AIMS Convention, 1948,” 47.

30

Hy Gold, “The AIMS Professional Student Conference on Discrimination and Academic Freedom,” Interne 15, no. 6 (June 1949), 159.

31

Ruberman, “Report on AIMS Convention, 1948,” 47.

32

The anti-NHI letter is in “AIMS and National Health Insurance: AIMS Encourages Discussion,” Interne 15, no. 6 (June 1949), 161, 163, 167.

33

Ruberman to JAMA, 9 July 1949 in JAMA 140, no. 10 (July 1949), 908.

34

Sheppard Carl Thierman, “AIMS International Program,” Interne 15, no. 10 (November 1949), 291, 295-6.

35

The International Union of Students and the Association of Internes and Medical Students,“ May 1949 in AIMS Papers; “National Executive Committee Meeting,” resolution, 19 June 1949 in AIMS Papers.

36

Halstead Holman, “Preliminary Report of the AIMS Representative to the Third Council Meeting of the IUS, Sofia, Bulgaria,” 15-25 September, 1949 in AIMS Papers.

37

Lewis Rowland and Lown to Holman, 31 December 1949 in Box 26, Folder 6, Lown Papers.

38

Holman to Rowland and unknown AIMS officer [based on first name probably Charles Kennedy, AIMS Interne Secretary or Charles Nugent, AIMS Organizational Secretary], December 1949 in AIMS Papers; Holman to Rowland and Thierman, 1 December 1949 in AIMS Papers.

39

Ruberman, “Report of AIMS Convention, 1949,” Interne 16, no. 2 (February 1950), 30.

40

“Current Comment: Association of Interns and Medical Students,” JAMA 142, no. 2 (January 1950), 113.

41

“Leftist Minority Woos Future Doctors: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Association of Internes and Medical Students,” Medical Economics, March 1950, 78-9, 89.

42

Ibid.

43

Ibid., 85.

44

Ibid., 83-5.

45

Ibid.

46

Ibid., 87, 91.

47

Ibid., 91-3.

48

Foulks to Editor, Medical Economics, February 1950 in AIMS Papers.

49

Ibid.

50

“Medical Economics: A Drama in Three Parts,” Interne 16, no. 3 (March-April 1950), 58-61.

51

“Report of Council on Medical Education and Hospitals,” JAMA 143, no. 11 (July 1950), 992-94.

52

Ibid.

53

Ibid.

54

“Leftist Minority Woos Future Doctors”; “Report of Council on Medical Education and Hospitals.”

55

“The AMA and AIMS,” Interne 16, no. 4 (May-June 1950), 87; Foulks to Ernest E. Irons, early 1950 in AIMS Papers. Both these documents also detail the AMA-AIMS meeting, though obviously from the perspective of AIMS.

56

“The AMA and AIMS,” 83-9; “Addendum,” JAMA 143, no. 11 (July 1950), 994-95.

57

“Report of the Discharge of Dr. Sheppard C. Thierman, Interne at Kings County Hospital, February 1950,” ca. spring 1950 Box 23, Folder 246, Papers of the Physicians Forum, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA [hereafter referred to as Physicians Forum Papers]. Stanley M. Isaacs to Marcus D. Kogel, 31 March 1950 in Box 16, Folder 246, Physicians Forum Papers; Boas to Kogel, 6 April 1950 in Box 23, Folder 246, Physicians Forum Papers; Kogel to Boas, 14 April 1950 in Box 23, Folder 246, Physicians Forum Papers; Boas to Isaacs, 30 March 1950 in Series I: Correspondence, Box “A-Ci,” Folder “Association of Internes and Medical Students,” Boas Papers; “Dismissed Interne is Upheld by Group,” New York Times, 20 June 1950; “Dr. Kogel Bars Reds in Hospitals of City,” New York Times, 22 June 1950; “Revised Draft,” summary of accusations against Thierman, ca. 1953 in Box 23, Folder 246, Physicians Forum Papers; “Thierman Cleared by Court-Martial,” New York Times, 6 August 1953.

58

“Report of Reference Committee on Reports of Board of Trustees and Secretary,” JAMA 143, no. 12 (July 1950), 1088.

59

Osibin to Foulks, 15 May 1951 in AIMS Papers. SAMA’s current incarnation is the American Medical Student Association (AMSA), which split from the AMA officially in 1967. Although it today attracts left-of-center medical students, it has rather politically unsavory roots in McCarthyism!

60

Charlie Nugent to Lear, 19 September 1950 in AIMS Papers, Lear Collection.

61

Ibid.

62

“Editorial,” AIMS Pulse 1, no. 1 (June 1950), 2 in AIMS Papers, Lear Collection.

63

“The Executive Committee,” AIMS Announces 1, no. 2 (April 1951), 1.

64

The Interne 17, no. 1 (September-October 1951).

65

Eighth Report of the Senate Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities (Sacramento: Senate Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, 1955), 79, 86-7, 152-3, 157.

66

For standard versions of this narrative, see Kenneth Ludmerer, Time to Heal: American Medical Education from the Turn of the Century to the Era of Managed Care (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Rosemary Stevens, American Medicine and the Public Interest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998 [1971]); Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

67

Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 183-190.

68

Storrs, 258.

69

Others, however, were luckier, though not without experiencing extended grief. J. T. H. Connor, for example, documents the mid-1940s travails of Rural Health and Medical Care, a volume by Frederick D. Mott and Milton Roemer, that the New York Academy of Medicine originally intended to publish before an extended look at the authors’ views on comprehensive health care planning, national health insurance, and politics more generally. (Roemer’s passport had just been revoked.) McGraw-Hill ultimately published the book in 1948. See J. T. H. Connor, “‘One Simply Doesn’t Arbitrate Authorship of Thoughts’: Socialized Medicine, Medical McCarthyism, and the Publishing of Rural Health and Medical Care,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 72, no. 3 (July, 2017): 245-71.

70

Kimberly Philips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009); Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America (New York: Penguin Books, 2017).

71

William Bronston, M.D., interview by Kathy Cowan, 12 October 2001-7 February, 2002, The Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement Oral History Series, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA. For an account of SHO’s rise, see Naomi Rogers, “‘Caution: The AMA May Be Dangerous to Your Health’: The Student Health Organizations (SHO) and American Medicine, 1965–1970,” Radical History Review 80 (Spring 2001): 5-34; Fitzhugh Mullan, White Coat, Clenched Fist: The Political Education of an American Physician (New York: Macmillan, 2006); Michael R. McGarvey, Fitzhugh Mullan, and Steven S. Sharfstein, “A Study in Medical Action — The Student Health Organizations,” New England Journal of Medicine (July 11, 1968) 279, no. 2: 74-79.

72

William Bronston, M.D., interview by Kathy Cowan, 12 October 2001-7 February, 2002.

73

Harmon, 505-7; Ludmerer, 243.

74

Mary Bassett, “#BlackLivesMatter — A Challenge to the Medical and Public Health Communities,” New England Journal of Medicine 372 (March 19, 2015).

Published by Oxford University Press 2019.

This work is written by US Government employees and is in the public domain in the US.

Published by Oxford University Press 2019.

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