1915

Heinrich Stern founds American College of Physicians to delineate internists, albeit a “pale shadow” of British Royal College of Physicians (Stevens, 92ff.). It was modeled on, and followed by two years, the founding of the American College of Surgeons: “The Standards of the American College of Surgeons were to provide a discriminating mark by which the better trained could be identified form the mass, but the aim was to upgrade the entire practice of surgery. The field of internal medicine never saw itself, in a similar way, as a force for reform throughout the entire medical profession. In standing apart from and above general practice, it continued to adopt an elitist point of view. . . Leaders in the emerging departments of medicine had little interest in Stern or his apparent status seeking. To the stars in academic medicine, the new College appeared pretentious, irrelevant, unnecessary, and perhaps even faintly absurd. . . The leading physicians in academic medicine did not need professional organizations to define their fields; their roles already had been defined by virtue of their rank in university departments of medicine and their positions in national networks” (Stevens, IV, 595).