Specialization

In 1920, AMA Council on Medical Education and Hospitals organized 15 specialist committee to develop undergraduate medical curricula and programs to mark specialist skills: “The plight of general practice and its relationships with specialties raised other definitional problems for internal medicine in the 1920s. General practice was becoming a field defined functionally by exclusion and educationally by interiority. Without a separate committee of investigation in the AMA reports in the early 1920s, general practice could have been defined as something left over after each special field had carved out its domain; how it was to be defined in terms of education was moot. University-based physicians tended to see general practice as a relatively comprehensive medical education that preceded specialization by a select few; in short, they saw general practice as a preliminary, inferior, or lesser brand of education, with specialization representing the intellectual elite” (Stevens IV, 596).