Morris Fishbein

I have delayed writing this review because I have long admired the ability of Dr. Morris Fishbein to write about medicine, even though I have only rarely shared his political views. His autobiography comes as a great disappointment to me because I can find little in it of interest. I finally rose from my apathy to write this notice because a Yale medical student asked, "Who is Morris Fishbein?" when he saw the book lying on my desk. I suppose that alone should be justification enough for a Life, but that Yale medical student had never heard of John Peters or, for that matter, of Samuel Harvey; I did not dare to ask him about Paul Beeson! Eheu fugaces! Morris Fishbein, children, was Editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association for over thirty years and, rightly or wrongly, to us of currently withering middle age, personified the A.M.A.'s resistance to social change in most health fields. During the years that Morris Fishbein was Editor, the J.A.M.A. left the vanguard of liberal legislation to take a position attacking prepaid health care, Blue Cross, and other programs which have protected the American public. Indeed, the current scarcity of physicians and the crisis in medical education can be traced, I believe, even more to the A.M.A.'s old resistance to any governmental support of medicine than to the medical schools' willingness, during the days of N.I.H. largesse, to distort themselves like babies in Chinese jars into any shape that seemed designed to attract money. For all these reasons and more, I would have expected to find in the pages of this Autobiography much from Dr. Fishbein's own extremely rich experience, particularly as he is a compelling speaker and the polished author of some thirty odd books. We had the right to expect some observations on the social and medical scene and on the political considerations that led to various A.M.A. activities; but if those comments are in this book, I could not sort them out from the laundry lists of appointments and old friends which cover its pages. We hardly learn what happened when Dr. Fishbein was fired as Editor of the J.A.M.A. in 1949. Where is Dr. Fishbein's diary? Here we have only his appointment book. Interminable lists of dinner partners and friends, of cities that heard him, substitute for his reflections on that era when society was moving ahead and …