In Chicago

Weightiest problem brought before the American Medical Association's 30th Congress on Medical Education, Licensure and Hospitals, meeting in Chicago's Palmer House last week, was proposed by a law school dean, Duke's Justin Miller. His problem: "Whether to keep standards, as the law profession has done, so low that the profession is constantly concerned with the problem of eliminating shysters or, as physicians have done, to keep standards so high that the profession is constantly concerned by activities of quacks and fakirs outside."

For that dilemma the medical men had no quick solution. But they were ready when Dean Miller later remarked: "If it be true, as has been stated to me, that from 40% to 60% of all operations for appendicitis are unnecessary and that a considerable portion could be avoided by proper psychiatric diagnosis, then the public has only a little more to fear from fakirs than from physicians."

Retorted the A. M. A.'s President Dean De Witt Lewis: "I'm wondering whether he [Miller] was told that by the chief psychiatrist in one of those institutions for mental cases he speaks of, or by one of the inmates."

Attended by some 400 medical school deans, state health officials, hospital executives et al., the Congress is an annual forum for the airing of new ideas, the refurbishing of old ones. Some of this year's crop:

Plumbers. Rising to urge more cultural courses for medical students. President Robert Gordon Sproul of the University of California declared: "From earliest times the physician has been honored by society, usually because he was a person of broad learning and high ethical standards. . . . Too many doctors today are little more than plumbers."

Fees. "The really big man in medicine has not gained distinction from high fees. Our really successful men have been small fee men. It is the little soul whose creed is greed who really charges the limit, no matter how seriously it may distress his patient."--Dr. Nathan Bristol Van Etten, vice speaker of the House of Delegates of the A. M. A.

"The thought of paying for illness seems indeed a hardship if it entails the giving up of an automobile, a radio or an electric refrigerator. Do not the continued harping on the high costs of medical care and efforts made to reduce these costs by lowering professional charges encourage this state of mind in the public?"--Dr. John H. J. Upham, chairman of the board of trustees of the A. M. A.

Hospital Business-- Howard Stix Cullman, president of New York City's Beekman Street Hospital, advised hospital trustees to let physicians determine their hospitals' medical policy, turn themselves to the badly-run business end. Cried he: "Certainly no intelligent group of businessmen would tolerate accounting systems so unstandardized that a comparative study of costs is almost impossible. Certainly no commercial enterprise could exist with so chaotic a labor situation as prevails in our hospitals, where a completely unstandardized wage scale has resulted in an annual turnover large enough to wreck the average business."

Thirty Years was the time Stanford University's President Ray Lyman Wilbur, M. D., gave doctors to begin keeping Man well instead of curing him.

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