Tuesday Open Line


What is perhaps the nation’s foremost professional organization, the American Medical Association, was founded this week 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 more than 700,000. Physicians and surgeons have median annual earnings of more than $187,000, six times the national workforce individual median of about $31,000, and more than triple the $56,000 annual median earnings of health care practitioners and technicians in general. You can find more facts about America from the U.S. Census Bureau online at <www.census.gov>.