No Time to Retire

Dr. Morris Fishbein, long the big mouthpiece of the American Medical Association and self-appointed spokesman of organized U.S. medicine, finally found his forum cut from under him. Since his A.M.A. bosses clamped a tight muzzle on him last summer (TIME, June 20), it had not been much of a forum. This week, well aware that he was no longer welcome in it, Morris Fishbein resigned the editorship of the Journal and half a dozen other A.M.A. publications.

At 60, squat, articulate Dr. Fishbein was still full of energy and plans. Said he: "I don't feel like relaxing. There is no fixed retirement age for human beings. I have been associated recently with five men over 80 in the medical profession, and they are still doing great work."

To keep his editorial hand in, Dr. Fishbein was taking on more duties as consulting editor of Doubleday & Co. and its medical subsidiary, the Blakiston Co., for which he had long worked in his spare time. He will continue as medical editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Hearst's American Weekly, in his spare time will write a syndicated daily column and two monthly columns, and hold down teaching posts at the University of Chicago and University of Illinois medical schools. Somehow, Dr. Fishbein also expects to have time for a lecture tour and for work on a layman's guide to modern psychiatry.

Many medical men, including a few of Dr. Fishbein's sometime detractors, feel that he has been shabbily treated by the A.M.A. after 37 years of faithful, loud-voiced service. But Fishbein, showing no malice, says: "I never get mad at anybody. I stopped having feelings long ago." But those who have dared Dr. Fishbein's displeasure may eventually get their comeuppance: he is already at work on his memoirs.

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