Renamed the California Medical Association in 1923, the professional association of California’s physicians has grown to 35,000 members.
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Benjamin Franklin Keene, M.D., CMA's first president |
The visionary physicians who founded CMA when Sacramento was a boomtown dedicated their organization to “promote the science and art of medicine, protection of public health, and the betterment of the medical profession.” That motto is reflected in the group’s many accomplishments.
- Made immunizations compulsory for school children in the 1880s
- Started the state public health department in the 1870s
- Began looking at ways to fund health care for the poor in the 1930s
- Performed some of the first cornea transplants, and set up some of the first organ transplant guidelines in the country
- Started California’s first medical school, which later became Stanford
- Led and still leads the fight against tobacco use and smoking
Many of the battles fought by those frontier physicians—to understand new illnesses, to deliver health care to all, to teach the public about health and disease prevention, to expand knowledge among physicians, and improve medical treatment—are with us today.
A mixture of history and happenstance led those early pioneer physicians to create one of the first professional organizations of physicians West of the Mississippi River. The Gold Rush of 1849 drew people of all stripes. Hundreds of thousands of opportunists and adventurers transformed the wilderness of Northern California. Too many people coming over trail and sea under arduous conditions arrived in an area with little housing and poor sanitary conditions. Disease was inevitable.
The healthful paradise that so colored the descriptions of California became the site of a health tragedy unequaled before in this country. The floods of 1850 first brought typhoid, encephalitis, diarrhea, malnutrition and other disorders. Opportunity also brought the snake oil salesmen eager to separate settlers from their gold. These scourges were complicated by the arrival of cholera in 1850. And physicians at the time, with no germ theory yet declared and very little science behind them, did not understand the causes of these illnesses.
The cholera epidemic of 1850 killed about 5,000 people in Sacramento and the surrounding valleys – the population center of the state at the time. About 80% of the population fled in fear from a disease that had no cure and whose cause was unknown. The physicians stayed, treating the patients of this mystery illness – and they died.
Seventeen physicians – about one third of those in the state at the time – died of the scourge of cholera. The 17 physicians who died in that Sacramento epidemic are buried under what is now Broadway.
John Morse, M.D., a physician writer and historian of the time, wrote of the physicians’ dedication: “And yet not one educated physician turned his back upon the city in its distress and threatened destruction.”
The physicians who survived came to know each other well, as colleagues and friends. County medical societies came first, starting in Sacramento and San Francisco.
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Thomas Logan, M.D., CMA president 1870 |
The corresponding secretaries of each of these societies – E.S. Cooper, M.D., in San Francisco and Thomas Logan, M.D., in Sacramento – wrote each other, deciding to organize a state meeting on the “third Wednesday of March 1856.” There was much controversy over the admission of “irregular” physicians, or “quacks.” A credentials committee formed to “prevent admission of improper persons.”
Benjamin Franklin Keene, M.D., of El Dorado County, already a state legislator representing the most populous county at the time, was elected president of the Medical Society of the State of California. Dr. Keene would not live to complete his term, and Dr. Cooper became the president a few months later. Years down the road, Dr. Logan would become president of both the CMA and the AMA. Dr. Logan would also start the state Department of Public Health and a Board of Public Health – only the second such office in the country, after Massachusetts.
During the next 20 years following the founding of the state society, these physicians would establish additional county societies; compile birth, death and disease statistics throughout the state; collect data on weather and weather patterns – for this was believed to be tied to health; and they would build hospitals and medical schools. This group of physician leaders would also host the very first AMA convention on the West Coast – after the building of the railroad to California.