California Medical Association - History - Organization

Organization

On 12 March 1856, the Medical Society of the State of California held its first meeting at Pioneer Hall on J Street in what is now Old Town Sacramento. The society's first president, Benjamin Franklin Keene, M.D.—also a state senator representing El Dorado County—led the meeting of 1875.

After the 1850 cholera outbreak in Sacramento, the surviving physicians became close colleagues and friends, and began to found county medical societies. The first were founded in Sacramento and San Francisco. Each society kept in contact, and society secretaries Thomas Logan, M.D., (Sacramento) and Elias Cooper, M.D., (San Francisco)—historical figures in their own right—set up that landmark first meeting in 1856. Dr. Logan, a notable medical scholar, would later reform the CMA after years of strife, reorganizing the society in 1875 and eventually serving as the state’s Director of Public Health as well as president of the CMA and then the American Medical Association. Dr. Cooper, an eye surgeon and co-founder of the Illinois Medical Society previously, would found the medical school that became Stanford University School of Medicine.

Controversy arose over which physicians were credible, and as a result a credentials committee formed to "prevent admissions of improper persons." Dr. Morse became the Medical Society’s first Censor, a precursor to the Medical Board of California of today.

In the early years, travel was difficult, so that the society's focus remained in Northern California, and its counterpart, the Southern California Medical Society, was not created until 1898. County societies sprouted up throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s. In 1900, CMA membership cost $10 and included malpractice coverage. In 1923, the society renamed itself the California Medical Association to comply with name changes at other state medical associations and the American Medical Association.

John Frederick Morse, M.D., a historian and journal editor for the medical society who would form some of the first disciplinary and licensing terms for state physicians, is credited with starting the first journal of the Medical Society, starting with his own funds a short-lived publication called the California State Journal of Medicine. There were several revivals of publications over the years. In 1873, the society published the first Transactions of the Medical Society of California, a volume published annually until Volume 31, issued in April 1901. In that year it was recommended that, because the annual transactions were "an extravagant and unnecessary way of perpetuating the proceedings of the society, the more rational one of publishing a monthly journal" be adopted. Thus, The California State Journal of Medicine was revived. In 1924 its name was changed to California and Western Medicine, and in 1946 to California Medicine. The late Philip Mills Jones, M.D., is regarded as that journal’s founder.

In 1974, the journal became The Western Journal of Medicine, in conjunction with a plan to create a regional medical journal for the West. For more than twenty years, The Western Journal served as the official journal for the state medical associations of Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, and six research and specialty societies, in addition to the CMA. In 1998, the Journal was taken over by the British Medical Journal, and has since ceased publication.