ABSTRACT
Supervised and corporate practice represents a significant and lasting change in the American medical profession, bringing both problems and opportunities in its wake. The medical profession has ridden triumphantly through most of the twentieth century along a road paved with assumptions and structures about disease that are based on the infectious diseases. In the early years of the twentieth century, the reform of the American medical profession, with medical education based at universities, was justified by centering medical education around research, in laboratories and on the hospital wards. Even more central to the future role of the medical profession are the overlapping changes in the behavioral and cognitive aspects of medicine, that is, in the doctor-patient relationship, and in the structure and meaning of medicine. If patients are seen as consumers as well as partners in the healing process, a major shift in power relationships between the public and the profession can be observed.
