Medicine: A Needle for the Doctors

Is there a shortage of doctors in the U.S.? And if so, why? One reason, said four learned laymen last week, is the doctors themselves—they keep their profession too exclusive.

The laymen were liberal arts deans, who had made a year's study of preprofessional education. Their bombshell was exploded in the academic calm of the American Conference of Academic Deans at Cincinnati last week. The four-man committee proposed a resolution declaring: "Annually several thousand students fully qualified in training, personality and temperament are denied admission to the professional [medical] training of their choice. This set of conditions constitutes a most serious threat to the continued health and well-being of the American people."

Before this tough language was deleted, Northwestern's Dean Simeon E. Leland charged that the medical profession is governed by "Petrillo and Fishbein economics." "Medicine," said he, "is the only profession where the element of competition comes only at the beginning ... If we had more, we would have better doctors. There would be more opportunity for medical research and competition would weed out the weaker ones as it does in other professions."

Ohio State's young (37), earnest Junior Dean William S. Guthrie quoted figures designed to show that there was a growing shortage of doctors. In 1905 and in 1949, he said, the number of medical students in the U.S. was almost the same—though the population had all but doubled. Guthrie contended that the World War II speedup in medical colleges should be continued.

This, retorted the medical educators, was a fallacy: the wartime program, with its overcrowding and understaffing, had not given medical students the experience which they—and their future patients—deserved.

But many medical men were helping to prove their critics' main point. While arguing that there was no shortage of doctors, they pointed proudly to long-range plans for increasing the output.