Shifting the Narrative of American Medical History

Abstract

In many ways, this shift paralleled the decade's larger conservative turn, but when American politics shifted leftward during the Great Depression in the 1930s, the AMA continued to take professional medicine into "ultra-conservative” territory, much to the social disadvantage of Americans. Medicine's reactionary turn brought the profession into questionable relationships with the drug and tobacco industries, which in turn led to profits that the AMA used to lobby politicians and influence public opinion against public health and national health care plans that AMA leadership feared would compromise physicians' influence within the health-care marketplace. According to Swenson, recent developments within medicine, including the AMA support for the Affordable Care Act (signed into law in 2010) and physicians joining together during the COVID epidemic to support public health directives in the face of impassioned conservative opposition, point to how the profession may be on the verge of another pendulum swing back to its progressive roots.