Thursday, May 7th. What is perhaps the nation’s foremost professional organization, the American Medical Association, was founded on this date in 1847 in Philadelphia. Two hundred-fifty delegates from 28 states attended the founding meeting, which adopted the first code of medical ethics and established the first nationwide standards for preliminary medical education and the degree of MD. At the time, there were some 50,000 medical doctors in the U.S. Today, there are 600,000. Physicians and surgeons have median annual earnings of more than $187,000, six times the national workforce individual median of about $30,500, and triple the $54,000 annual median earnings of health care practitioners and technicians in general. Profile America is beginning its 19th year as a public service of the U.S. Census Bureau.