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====Passing a Medical Licensing Bill====
====Conclusion====While Oregon was one of the last states to pass a medical licensing laws, it took some states anywhere from 5 to 10 years to pass a version of this law. Ultimately, Oregon physicians could convince convinced the state legislature to pass a law to bribe by bribing lawmakers still. Still, after the law was passed, legislators legislative amendments to these laws that strengthened these laws without additional monetary incentives.
Admin moved page How did Oregon pass Medical Licensing Laws in the 19th Century? to How did Oregon pass Medical Licensing Laws in the 19th Century
During the legislative session, the local newspaper, <i>The Morning Oregonian</i>, covered OSMA’s push for licensing. <i>The Oregonian</i>, the state’s largest newspaper, despite its support of medical regulation, published an article of a similar effort to license in Massachusetts. In the Oregonian article, an attorney speaking before the Massachusetts legislature testified that medical science failed in treating patients and argued that the doctrine of supply and demand was the best way to regulate medicine. A letter to the editor of <i>Capitol Evening Journal</i> lambasted the so-called “quack bill” as an attempt to eliminate competition. Additionally, the writer was aghast that the bill invested enormous power with a three-physician medical board.<ref>“The Quack Bill,” <i>Capitol Evening Journal</i>, Feb. 27, 1889.</ref> These complaints were essentially the same ones that scuttled previous medical regulations. Oregon papers were skeptical of medical regulations.
The bill passed and authorized creating a medical licensing board and established specific criteria to receive an Oregon medical license. The medical board consisted of three members who had the power to approve three separate types of licenses that would permit medicine. First, individuals who could establish that they received a diploma or license from a legally chartered institution of good standing could qualify. Second, the board could issue licenses to anyone, regardless of educational background, by administering a test that evaluated the potential practitioner's qualifications. Finally, doctors and surgeons already practicing in Oregon at the time the act was passed could simply register with the office of the county clerk sixty days after the act’s approval and continue their practices.<ref><i>Oregon Sessions Law</i>, “An Act to Regulate the Practice of Medicine,” 1891, section 3.</ref> Anyone who practiced medicine in violation of this act was guilty of a misdemeanor.
Under the promulgated standards, Dickson postulated that graduates of forty of the existing one-hundred-and-thirty-five American medical institutions would be forced to take an exam under Oregon law. The 1891 revision also placed physicians who registered with the county clerks under the medical board's control. Under the 1889 Act, the board lacked jurisdiction over these physicians and could not discipline them for dishonorable conduct.<ref><i>Proceedings Eighteenth Annual Meeting</i> (1891): 177-180.</ref> The 1891 act remedied the problem and compelled all practitioners to submit themselves to the board for a license. Not only did the medical board draft standards, it immediately exercised its statutory authority and began rejecting applicants.
====Imposing and The Licensing Exam and new Ethical Standards====
In 1895, Oregon again altered its medical licensing law by requiring all applicants to pass a licensing exam. The 1895 amendment also expanded the Oregon Medical Board's power to revoke a physician's license for unprofessional or dishonorable conduct, including any physician who was originally exempted in the first law. Soon thereafter, the Oregon board immediately targeted physicians in the state. The 1895 statute specified the grounds for unprofessional or dishonorable conduct: Taking part in a criminal abortion, employing “cappers” and “steerers,” obtaining a fee and claiming the ability to cure an incurable disease or condition, betraying a professional secret, using untruthful or improbable statements in advertisements, a conviction of any offense involving moral turpitude and habitual intemperance, and advertising medicines claiming to regulate the monthly periods of women.<ref><i>Oregon Laws</i>, 1895, 61-65, sec. 6.</ref>
The Estes case showed that courts were not going to bar doctors from practicing based solely on criminal convictions. To suspend or expel physicians from medicine, medical boards were going to have to prove cases in their own administrative hearings. They simply could not rely on outside hearings. Additionally, the court made that they were willing to scrutinize medical board decision. They were going to just rubber-stamp their decisions.
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