A. M. A. Convention

Balmy Portland, Ore., last week well entertained what at torrid Minneapolis last year its representatives had fought and bargained for, the 80th convention of the American Medical Association. Portland is an expensive journey from the populous midwest and eastern medical centres, so the convention was not so well attended as have been most other recent ones. More nearly centralized, although hot, Detroit will have next summer's convention.

The three men who for an instant bore the title of Association President each delivered an address unusually vigorous.

Outgoing President William Sydney Thayer, 65, Massachusetts-born, Harvard-taught Baltimore physician and poet, put a valedictory damnation on legislation which seeks to govern "what we may or may not eat or drink, as to how we may dress, as to our religious beliefs or as to what we may or may not read." In an exhortation which without his rising preamble might have sounded crass at an American Medical Convention, he cried: "This is no longer republican government. It is tyranny. In the long run we English-speaking people will not endure tyranny." His general denunciation of sumptuary legislation was, of course, received as a specific condemnation of Prohibition.* It reverberated throughout the land. The loudest echo came from Clarence True Wilson, 57, Ph. B., LL. D., general secretary of the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition & Public Morals, who chanced to be in Portland at the moment.f Dr. Wilson declared that President Thayer had "railroaded" himself into office. He said: "I was in Washington looking on [at the 1927 A. M. A. Convention] when Dr. William Gerry Morgan was nominated for the presidency and without a campaign stood in a dignified way and was voted for and came within a. few votes of being elected. But Dr. Thayer's wet crowd came down from Baltimore to put over a champion and they canvassed and crusaded and that unsuspecting body just barely did it, never thinking that there was a liquor deal in all that propaganda."

When the Portland convention heard this charge there was indignant clamor. Dr. Thomas Clark Chalmers of Manhattan declared: "In this election at Washington, it was I, always known as a wet, who was Dr. Morgan's manager."

The consensus of the convention, expressed in a unanimous vote of confidence in outgoing President Thayer, was that sumptuary legislation, including Prohibition, baffles medical practice, that alcoholics are at times a medical necessity.

President-Elect William Gerry Morgan. The convention elected Dr. William Gerry Morgan of Washington to take office as president next year at Detroit. Whether or not Prohibitor Wilson felt, as some charged, that his presence in Portland was influencing the convention and partly responsible for the election of Dr. Morgan, who was the Wilson candidate in 1927, the majority of physicians voting retained a clear picture of Dr. Morgan's high professional standing. He promised to try to-clarify the muddle of medical costs now vexing the profession. Dr. Morgan said he supposed "that the true difficulty may lie in the elaborate and expensive diagnostic procedures which the public has come to demand, as well as the luxurious nursing provisions which have come to be regarded as essential." He believes fewer complaints on medical costs have come from the poor than from the "idle rich." Dr. Morgan's specialty is diseases of the digestive organs, a subject in which he is a professor at Georgetown University.

In-going President Malcolm La- Salle Harris, 67, of Chicago, anesthesia authority, personified a nervous expectation which originated in his city and ran through the convention--that Dr. Louis Ernst Schmidt of Chicago would demand of the Association his reinstatement in the Chicago Medical Society. That society last spring ousted Dr. Schmidt, famed genitourinary surgeon, because he was a urologist as well as chief of staff of the Illinois Social Hygiene League which treats charity patients of Chicago's Public Health Institute, a clinic operating not for profit on the treatment of venereal diseases (TIME, April 22). To induce venereals to take treatments the Institute advertised in Chicago papers. To the League the Institute paid $12,000 yearly to treat charity cases, and Dr. Schmidt as a League urologist took nominal fees out of that $12,000. This was a nice case for professional dialectics: Dr. Schmidt " unethically" advertising for clients. The Illinois Medical Society refused to induce the Chicago society to reinstate Dr. Schmidt. The national Association, to which Dr. Schmidt had appealed, kept the subject anesthetized last week in its judicial council, which in the course of its next year's deliberations will consider its merits.

Back of the Schmidt ouster is of course the antagonism of private practitioners to institutional, or group, medicine as practiced by the Social Hygiene League or the more famed Life Extension Institute. To that general controversy Dr. Harris alluded directly in his inaugural address, and to the Schmidt case obliquely.

Said he: "It is chiefly the press that has raised its voice loudest against the principle of medical ethics that places a taboo on advertising by the physician. It is readily admitted that the lifting of the ban . . . would result in a great financial gain to the press. . . .

Opposed though he is to group practice, for the sake of lowering costs to poor patients Dr. Harris recommended that doctors organize and incorporate pay clinics in their counties. Patients would pay fees according to their economic status. For charity cases the community would pay flat fees agreed to by public officials and the doctors. The doctors would split the profits of the clinic among themselves, as its stockholders.

The House of Delegates, governing body of the Association, considered President Harris's plan, but refused to endorse it without reservations.

Besides following the above excursions of its three presidents, the Association pursued its major purpose of recounting the past year's researches. Some addresses:

Morris Fishbein, 40, editor of the Association's medical journals, vigorously thwacked the widespread idea that operating on the gonads or any other procedure will prolong life. Said he: "A tissue that has died can no more be restored to life than can new elasticity be put into a pair of worn-out suspenders."

Lovell Langstrotk of San Francisco reported that he improved the condition of middle-aged patients with rheumatism, heart disease, diabetes and other degenerative diseases by feeding them largely on vitamin-bearing foods--eggs, milk, fruit, vegetables.

Lloyd Mills of Los Angeles quoted Shakespeare's, ''He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes," and prayed that schools cease driving children into neuroses by too swift education.

James Carruthers Masson of Rochester, Minn. (Mayo Clinic) said: "If it were possible to ascertain the number of cases of cancer throughout the country, the number of successful operations and the number of deaths prevented, the evidence most conclusively would support the conviction that the control of cancer is being realized to an increasing extent."

Eugene S. Kilgore of San Francisco scolded doctors for talking too much about heart disease. Such talk frequently makes people worry about their hearts, and the worry frequently disturbs the heart or circulatory system.

Walter M. Simpson of Dayton, Ohio, reported on the number of cases of undulant fever and tularemia he had found in Ohio by watching for them. For his researches the American Society of Clinical Pathologists awarded him their first Ward Burdich Medal, in memory of Ward Burdich of Denver, founder of the Society in 1921, who died last year.

Henry Hurd Rusby, Columbia University's famed pharmacologist, had hoped that the Association would finally be induced to take up the campaign against "impure" ergot imports which he has been conducting in collaboration with Howard W. Ambruster, an independent Manhattan ergot importer (TIME, April 15, May 13). Apparently because of the commercial complications involved, the Association took no ergot action, left to the U. S. Government the enforcement of pure drug laws and standards.

Another Methodist attempt to meddle with Medicine brought another tart rebuke last week. The Voice of the Board of Temperance, Prohibition & Public Morals of the Methodist Episcopal Church had blasted at the "lying, murderous campaign of the American tobacco trust" to get women to smoke. The Voice had cried: "Sixty percent of all babies born of cigaret-sucking mothers die before they reach the age of two." Investigation showed that the Voice got its research from hearsay and a man whose name resembled that of a doctor whom the American Medical Association calls a quack.

Countered the Association Journal last week: "Smoking ... by women has no apparent influence over the functions of the genital system. . . . There is no mention [in expert research on the subject ] of tobacco heart in newborn children. . . . The morality of smoking by women is not a medical concern any more than the question as to whether or not they should go bareheaded into church."

* In wine-growing France, Professor Maurice Loeper of the Sorbonne last week completed a study purporting to prove that wine assists digestion, contains vitamins, radioactive properties. The finished Loeper document is an expansion of the famed Louis Pasteur proverb: "Wine is the most wholesome and the most hygienic of beverages." Into many a language will the document be translated by Office International du Vin, an anti-prohibitionist organization which claims it is "a sincere friend of temperance and a bitter enemy of alcoholism." Head of the "temperance" movement is Dr. Leon Douarch. Said he, last week: "We attempt no defense of hare liquor, but wine containing 10% of alcohol moderately and conservatively consumed, particularly at mealtime, can have no noxious effects In addition to being a stimulant, it is an excellent aliment for the manual as well as the intellectua worker."

/- Portland is Dr. Wilson's wife's home. He wa: pastor of Portland's Grace Church (1905-10) president of the Oregon Anti-Saloon League (1906-08).