Making of an Industrial Medicine Doctor in the early 20th Century in the United States, Part 2

This second of two clips from a 1946 film produced by General Motors provides a fictional history of the development of industrial medicine in the United States in the early 20th century. Medical services for workers in the United States were quite limited in the 19th century. The role of the company doctor was confined mainly to the surgical repair of victims of industrial accidents. In the early 1900s, while the surgical treatment of accidents remained paramount, industrial doctors began conducting periodic as well as pre-employment health exams and became more concerned with the health supervision of workers. With the adoption of workers comp laws beginning about 1910, industrial medicine also became increasingly involved in preventive medical engineering of the workplace. Doctors who worked for companies were generally regarded with suspicion by workers and by the medical profession. For a surgeon or physician to accept a position with a manufacturing company was to earn the contempt of his colleagues, wrote Alice Hamilton, physician and toxicologist who played a prominent role in exposing dangerous working conditions in the early decades of the 20th century. Industrial physicians were among the first doctors to work for salaries and quickly ran afoul of an American Medical Association, for which salary was anathema, but this distinction became blurred as more and more physicians joined salaried ranks. Read more in Paul Starrs book - The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry - published in 1982. His book was the winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize in American History and is a landmark history of how the entire American health care system of doctors, hospitals, health plans, and government programs has evolved over the last two centuries. It can be read online at:
http://books.google.com/books?id=FK4pBXGvQzoC&dq=The+Social+Transformatio... . The original film, Doctor in Industry (1946), produced by the General Motors Corporation is epic history of industrial medicine in the first half of the 20th century, showing how manufacturers and the medical profession came to terms with one another. It is available for downloading at the Internet Archives.

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