MEDICAL EXAMINATIONS

The Attorney General of Massachusetts has recently given a new interpretation of an old law which prevents a large number of graduates of the foremost medical schools in the country, among them Harvard, from taking the examinations to practice medicine in this State. Under this new ruling only three of the hundred or so applicants will be allowed to take the annual March examination, and these three men are graduates of a small college in Missouri. The reason for this peculiar state of affairs is that the law requires candidates to complete a four-year course of thirty-six weeks each year in an approved medical school, and that the Attorney General now holds that the thirty-six weeks must be weeks of instruction, and that vacation periods during the school year do not constitute weeks of instruction.

There would seem to be only two possible motives for the Attorney General's action. Either he is seeking a reputation for strict attendance to his legal duties, or he is making an effort to prevent graduates of the smaller, less well-equipped schools from taking the examinations in this State. The new ruling has this effect because the graduates of recognized schools such as Harvard are not dependent on the Massachusetts examinations to practice medicine in this State, but can take the more comprehensive national examinations, which most of the graduates of the smaller schools are unable to pass.

If, as is quite probable, the Attorney General is inspired by the second of these two motives, he may seem to be not only within the law but justified in his action. There is the gravest doubt, however, that the law was originally intended to exclude the vacation periods from the calculation. From 1917 until this present action the interpretation of the courts has favored their inclusion. But aside from this aspect, it is more important to note the vital stupidity inherent in the presumption that the caliber of a man's medical training can be even partially classified by measuring the number of weeks which he has studied.

During the current session of the Legislature the State Board of Registration introduced a bill which would have eliminated the quantitative requirement in favor of a qualitative standard manipulated by the board. It is no great compliment to the intelligence of the Massachusetts State Legislature to say that that bill was defeated. The Attorney General reflects the legislative attitude when he suggests that either the law must be changed to cut down the number of weeks or the schools must conform to the present ruling. It requires certainly no profound thought to see that if these qualifications for applicants are to signify anything save the utter ridiculous the quantitative method must give way immediately to the more intelligent method.