1889

In Dent v. West Virginia, U.S. Supreme Court upholds constitutionality of West Virginia’s Board of Health Act (1882), with its provision for mandatory state licensing. The WV law “implemented a state-sanctioned licensing process that put the future of medical care into the hands of those physicians most fully committed to educational uplift and scientific advance” (Mohr II, 160). The Court argued that the state’s statutory police powers in the realm of public health trumped an individual’s property rights (viz, an occupation (e.g., medical) practice = a form of property (i.e., an estate) in the eyes of the law [141]) without due process of law (Mohr II, 147-152). The decision represented a “policy wager” that improved standards of health care in the future would follow from a mastery of the academic sciences (159-160). The defenders of the WV license law – the elite regulars from the north (Wheeling) – could not “justify mandatory science-based licenses as a way to guarantee that all physicians would be able to understand and apply the new therapeutic advances then emerging from scientific laboratories, because the license law was passed before any significant therapeutic advances were made” (159).