This remarkable maneuver was effected by a remarkable man, George H. Simmons, M.D., who between 1899 and 1910 guided the Association through a series of delicate political and ethical adjustments designed to reconcile the interests of the regular profession with those of the proprietary medicine manufacturers.
Simmons possessed political abilities of giant proportions. Born in England in 1852, he emigrated to the United States at an early age and in 1882 was graduated from the Hahnemann Medical College of Chicago. For several years he was a homeopathic physician in Lincoln, Nebraska, and one of a rather partisan hue. He altered his therapeutic views, however, in the late 1880s and in 1892 secured a degree from the Rush Medical College of Chicago. He returned to Nebraska to become secretary of the allopathic state medical society and also of the (allopathic) Western Surgical and Gynecological Society. At this time he founded the Western Medical Review which immediately adopted a pronounced anti-homeopathic stance.
When the AMA Board of Trustees in 1899 decided to appoint a new secretary and editor of the Journal, a number of candidates were examined, and at length Simmons was selected for the post.
He was General Secretary and General Manager of the AMA from 1899 to 1911 and editor of the Journal from 1899 to 1924. His obituary reads:
to tell the story of the services of Dr. Simmons as General Manager from 1899 to 1924 is, in fact, to tell the history of the AMA in that period. . .Unquestionably he was the greatest figure in his generation in the development of the American Medical Association and the profession which it represents. At a 1924 testimonial dinner in honor of Simmons the speaker observed that the total number of subscribers to the Journal in 1900 was 13,078, while on January 1, 1924, it was 80,297: “the Journal has always been the chief source of financial income of the Association . . . [and] the present satisfactory status of organized medicine of the country, as represented by the American Medical Association, has been made possible by the reorganization of the Association [which was] mainly due to the leadership of George H. Simmons.”
Simmons immediately set himself to the task of finding a modus vivendi with the proprietary interests. The rules formulated in 1895 by the Board of Trustees had in no way resolved the problem, and the issue continued to be ventilated annually at the Association meetings. In 1900 P. Maxwell Foshay, editor of the Cleveland Medical Journal, published an important analysis of the problem. He observed that: “there being such a multiplicity of journals, few of them could live alone on their subscription receipts, and the pharmaceutical firms are appealed to for advertisements. . .So great has this abuse become that many drug houses. . .will not deal with a journal that does not, in its advertising contract, agree to publish, in addition to the advertisement in its proper place, and without extra compensation, certain advertising matter among its original articles or editorials.” Out of the 250 medical journals published, not a dozen made a rigid separation between advertisements and editorial matter.
Just another story in the subordination of the medical doctors to the pharmaceutical industry. Not much, just a little modification of ethical standards of the medical journals and the doctors in the various areas. And, yes, we are still supposed to trust the medical industry’s doctors, nurses and pharmaceutical producers, no matter how they have bent their ethics in pretzels or denied the Hippocratic Oath. Trust but verify is the best way of dealing with them.