Behind every U.S. Supreme Court case there is a human story. It is easy to lose sight of that truth behind the Latin phraseology and abstract legal doctrines. Sometimes the humanity involved springs to our mind just from the name of the case: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas (1954), Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) or Loving v. Virginia (1967). It is impossible to think of these cases without contemplating lives and stories of Linda Brown, Estelle Griswold, Mildred and Richard Loving. Last time on this blog I discussed the little known but important U.S. Supreme Court case, Hawker v ..read more

If you have been reading this blog or following me on Twitter (@davearlingtontx), you probably have a vague awareness of two U.S. Supreme Court cases critical to the evolution of medical regulation in this country. The earlier of the two cases, Dent v. West Virginia (1889) is the better known thanks in large part to the scholarly work of James Mohr in Licensed to Practice (Johns Hopkins Press, 2013). Check out my May 2021 blog post for a refresher on Dent.https://armchairhistorian.blog/2021/05/ Less well-remembered and the subject of this blog post is Hawker v. New York (1898), a disciplinary ..read more

Ask anyone who has conducted historical research and they’ll likely offer their own example of the scenario I’m about to share. You’re deep into researching one thing when suddenly you run across something entirely unexpected, only to find yourself irresistibly drawn away from what you were initially researching. Think dog sees squirrel and you’ll get the picture. You feel exhilarated tracking a little-known subject or story that seems to offer intriguing possibilities; you also can’t help feeling irritated with yourself for losing focus and valuable time traipsing deeper into a research fores ..read more

It would be naïve to think that this nation’s fraught history with race did not impact medical regulation. The challenge here, as for all the categories explored in this post, is pulling together a reasonable overarching narrative from fifty different states. If we pull back to a thirty-thousand foot view for medical regulation, however, there was one development that carried by far the greatest impact. Black Americans faced limited opportunities for medical education and, ultimately, licensure in the late 19th and early 20th century. These opportunities were curtailed further by reform measur ..read more

In Part 1 of this blog post, we explored medical regulation’s imperfect past, including the barriers that confronted women as well as the nature of the appointment process to state medical boards. In Part 2, we consider the experience of two more groups: international medical graduates (IMGs) and osteopathic physicians. IMGs The regulatory narrative around IMGs is rather unusual compared to that of other groups. In the late 19th and early 20th century, IMGs—especially those from Europe—often possessed medical education credentials considered every bit as good, if not better, than most US gradu ..read more

I’ve debated how I wanted to begin this post. I finally decided to open with the two pictures you see below. Both show the governing board for the Federation of State Medical Boards, the national organization supporting medical licensing authorities throughout the U.S.  On the left is the board in 1960; on the right, the current board. The two photos offer a striking contrast and they are also representative of this board’s composition—and that of medical regulation generally—in their respective eras. 1960 2021 Looking at these photos, it’s tempting to craft a soothing narrative, one allo ..read more

Writing about the history of medical regulation means spending a fair amount of time poking around the internet, browsing through online archives and searching Google Books. While the internet includes plenty of crap, there’s also valuable material hiding in plain sight for those willing to look for it. Take for example what I ran across recently: annual reports published by the Maryland State Board of Medical Examiners. These reports (1914, 1916, 1918, 1920, 1922, 1923) spanned nearly a decade over a century ago. Now I suspect some of you are thinking: “What possible interest could these have ..read more

In March 1899, the Minnesota legislature confirmed a series of appointments by Governor John Lind. Passing largely, but not entirely, unnoticed was the appointment of Dr. Adele Stuart Hutchinson to the Minnesota State Board of Medical Examiners. As the Minneapolis Homeopathic Magazine trumpeted in its headline, Minnesota had placed a woman on their state medical board—a first for the state and the country. Dr. Hutchinson served two terms (6 years) on the board from 1899-1905. In 1900, her peers on the board selected her as president of the board—a decision drawing a snide comment from one jour ..read more

I first stumbled upon Dr. Adele Hutchinson through a small news item in the Minneapolis Journal newspaper. What caught my eye was the statement that she was entering the last year of her second term on the Minnesota State Board of Medical Examiners. Surprised by this statement of fact, I quickly double checked the date of this news item—November 26, 1903. This meant Dr. Hutchinson had joined the Minnesota board in the mid- to late-1890s! I immediately suspected—and now feel confident in stating—that Adele Hutchinson was the first woman to serve on a state medical board in this country. This d ..read more

It is human nature to crave certainty…to seek a clear understanding of our world and definitive answers to the questions—big and small—that confront us. There’s a reason for this. Science suggests strongly that we, as humans, are fundamentally hard-wired to seek answers or explanations. Indeed, even when these are not available or immediately apparent, our minds work actively to supply them. Along the way is an accompanying human tendency toward reductivist thinking—the tendency to take complex questions and issues and rework them in order to reduce them to ones offering simplified, general an ..read more