At the February 1845 New York State Medical Society meeting, Dr Nathan Smith Davis “earnestly” recommend that a National Convention of Delegates from Medical Societies and Colleges in the whole Union… convene in the city of New York on the first Thursday in May, in the year 1846…”, the purpose begin to form a national medical association to “raise standards of medical education and of medical ethics”.
At this time medical school was “not exactly rigorous” nor costly. Dr Nathan Smith Davis (N.S.D) wrote about the sub-standard education in the Nov 1845 volume of the NY Journal of Medicine (NYJM) dated Sept. 22, 1845:
“All the young man has to do is gain admittance in the office of some physician, where he can have access to a series of ordinary medical text-books, and see a patient perhaps once a month, with perhaps a hasty post-mortem examination once a year; and in the course of three years thus spent, one or two courses of lectures in the medical colleges, where the whole science of medicine, including anatomy, physiology, chemistry, materia medica, pathology, practice of medicine, medical jurisprudence, surgery, and midwivery are all crowded upon his mind in the short space of sixteen weeks…and his education, both primary and medical, is deemed complete.” [1, 2]
The following year at the May 5, 1846 convention, Dr Davis was elected “chairman of the Committee on Correspondence relative to Medical Education and Examination” to summon the 1847 convention. The committee visited medical societies and colleges around the country presenting their proposal. It was because of his involvement Davis became known as the Founder of the AMA.
On May 7, 1847, at The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the National Medical Convention was held, attended by “250 delegates representing more than 40 medical societies and 28 colleges”. The delegates “approved a resolution to establish the American Medical Association (AMA) and elect Dr. Nathaniel Chapman as its first president.” [3, 4]
The AMA aimed to “establish both uniform educational requirements and a medical code of ethics” [8], which in 1903 became The Principles of Medical Ethics. [5, 6] They deemed homeopathy as “quack remedies” which at the time were “flourishing’.
Members of the AMA “had great animosity towards homeopathy and decided to purge all local medical societies of physicians who were homeopaths” or had any association with with them. [7]
In 1883, when Dr Davis was 66, he became the first editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), – the weekly periodical replaced the AMA’s yearly Transactions.
By November 1908 the Carnegie Foundation took over the work by the AMA’s Council on Medical Education of which Abraham Flexner produced the Flexner Report [PDF], which served as the roadmap to completely take over medical schools, raise the cost of entry and in time promote patentable chemical solutions – all in the name of “standardizing” education. This began the incremental demise of the successful and popular Homeopathic hospitals.