License to Practice

One of the greatest neuropathologists of Europe was last week denied a license to practice medicine in New York. In 1938 Dr. Otto Marburg and his wife left Vienna on the same train with their late great friend Sigmund Freud. They went to the U.S., Freud to Britain. In New York City, 66-year-old Dr. Marburg was given a Rockefeller research grant, a professor's title at Columbia, a laboratory in vast Montefiore Hospital.

But these honors gave him scarcely enough money to live on. Although in Vienna he had treated 3,000 patients a year, poor as well as rich, he had to apply for a license to practice in New York. Twice the Board of Regents refused him a license, insisted that he take an examination in the whole field of medicine, like any young medical student (an impossibly tough obstacle for a specialist who left medical school 42 years ago). Last spring, moved by the pleas of top-flight neurologists, the Appellate Division called the Regents unreasonable, ordered them to give Dr. Marburg a license, under a statute which waives an examination for eminent doctors.*

The stubborn Regents carried the case to the Court of Appeals, highest in the State. Last week the judges upheld them, said they could refuse Dr. Marburg his license once & for all. In court, the Regents frankly admitted that they were acting to protect the practices of New York physicians from the competition of refugees, not all of whom are so eminent as Dr. Marburg nor so scrupulous about how they get business. The Regents did not bring up the point that there is a great shortage of neurologists and psychiatrists in the U.S.

Now, if Dr. Marburg wants to examine a patient, he will have to take a licensed physician along.

Only four doctors have been considered eminent enough to win this privilege: Dr. Bela Schick, inventor of the Schick test for diphtheria immunity (not to be confused with Jacob Schick, inventor of the Schick razor); Nobelman George Hoyt Whipple, co-discoverer of the liver treatment for anemia; Dr. Manfred Sakel, originator of the insulin shock treatment for schizophrenia; Dr. Benjamin Philp Watson, head of Columbia's Sloane Hospital for Women.

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