Medicine: Stretching the Doctors

The U.S. doctor shortage was reviewed by the War Manpower Commission last week. Rock-bottom figure for effective U.S. physicians is 120,000 (after deducting retired doctors, those with full-time business or teaching jobs, and one-third of the physicians over 65). About 42,000 doctors, mostly men under 45, are now in uniform. This leaves some 80,000 at home. This year 11,455 more will go into service, leaving fewer than 70,000 for the 120,000,000 stay-at-homes (actually a few more, counting men coming out of retirement and those able to practice part-time).

The 11,455 new service doctors for 1943 is a comedown compared with the figures predicted last autumn (TIME, Nov. 9). At that time Dr. Frank H. Lahey of Boston, head of WMC’s Procurement and Assignment Service, was faced with Army & Navy demands for about 33,500 more doctors. He called a meeting of the officials involved, emphasized that doctors are not grown by sowing dragons’ teeth. The Army & Navy have since announced that they would cut their demand.

WMC points out that the chief trouble is still an old one, antedating the war: doctors are not proportionally distributed. If they were, the U.S. could still consider itself medically rich: at the end of 1943 the U.S. will have about one doctor to every 1,700 civilians (Britain has only one to every 2,700, Germany allegedly one to every 12,000—compared to one to 2,000 before the war). The services now average about one doctor to every 125 men.*

Figures on the relocation of doctors to ease pressure in short areas were not very encouraging last week. WMC has arranged about 400 shifts. (Sample doctor-short area: Mobile, Ala., where the population increased from 141,800 to 205,000 while doctors dropped from 128 to 90, 30 of them superannuated.)

A standing notice in the Journal of the A.M.A. and other medical periodicals asks doctors willing to move to communicate with Dr. Lahey’s committee. When possible, a doctor is moved to another spot in his own state, thus avoiding license complications. Few states have yet relaxed their license requirements to permit out-of-state doctors to move in during the emergency. A windfall for the committee is a doctor with licenses for several states.

* The New York Times’s military commentator Hanson Baldwin suggested last month that military doctors could be stretched further by picking up surgical teams from nonfighting garrisons where they have little to do, rushing them by plane as needed to handle wounded in combat zones.