Ira Rutkow's Seeking the Cure: A History of Medicine in America provides a brief overview of Fishbein's influence on American medicine during the Interwar period.[1]: 192–199
Fishbein is vilified in the chiropractic community due to his principal role in founding and propagating the campaign to suppress and end chiropractic as a profession due to its basis in pseudoscientific practices.[2]
He joined George H. Simmons, editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), as an assistant and advanced to the editorship in 1924, a position he maintained until 1950. He was on the cover of Time on June 21, 1937. In 1938, along with the AMA, he was indicted for violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.[4] The AMA was convicted and fined $2,500 but Fishbein was acquitted.[5]
In 1961 he became the founding Editor of Medical World News, a magazine for doctors. In 1970 he endowed the Morris Fishbein Center for the study of the history of science and medicine at the University of Chicago. Its first activity was a lecture series taking place in May of that year. Allen G. Debus served as director of the Center from 1971 to 1977. Fishbein also endowed a chair at the university for the same subject, a chair taken up by Debus in 1978. The 7th floor in Shoreland Hall at the University of Chicago was known as Fishbein House, using the Fishbein name as its namesake.
He died on September 27, 1976, in Chicago, Illinois.[6] He was survived by two daughters, Barbara Fishbein Friedell and Marjorie Clavey, and his son, Justin M. Fishbein.
In 1938, Fishbein authored a two-part article "Modern Medical Charlatans" in the journal Hygeia which criticized the quackery of Brinkley.[8] Brinkley sued Fishbein for libel but lost the case.[9] The jury found that Brinkley "should be considered a charlatan and a quack in the ordinary, well-understood meaning of those words." Fishbein responded that "the decision is a great victory for honest scientific medicine, for the standards of education and conduct established by the American Medical Association."[9]
Fishbein was critical of the activities of Mary Baker Eddy. He considered her a fraud and plagiarist.[10]
^Carl F Ameringer (2008). The Healthcare Revolution(PDF). University of California Press. p. 35. Archived from the original(PDF) on 28 May 2010. Retrieved 8 July 2010.
^"The Case of Brinkley Vs. Fishbein: Proceedings of a Libel Suit Based on an Article Published in Hygeia". Journal of the American Medical Association. 112 (19): 1952. May 13, 1939. doi:10.1001/jama.1939.02800190066017.
^ abLee, Alton R. (2002). The Bizarre Careers of John R. Brinkley. University of Kentucky Press. pp. 211-218. ISBN0-8131-2232-5
^Hudson, Robert P. (1983). Disease and Its Control: The Shaping of Modern Thought. Greenwood Press. p. 70.
Further reading
Theme Issue: The Fishbein Festschrift, Medical Communications, Vol.5, No.4, (1977).
Barclay, William R. (1976). "Morris Fishbein, MD—1889-1976; Editor of JAMA—1924-1950". JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association. 236 (19): 2212. doi:10.1001/JAMA.1976.03270200050033.
Bealle, Morris Allison, "Medical Mussolini", 'A Comprehensive Text Book on Humanity's Scourge - Medical Politics', Columbia Pub. Co, Washington D.C., 1945.
Brock, P., Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam, Crown Publishers, (New York), 2008. ISBN978-0-307-33988-1
Fishbein, M., The New Medical Follies: an encyclopedia of cultism and quackery in these United States, with essays on the cult of beauty, the craze for reduction, rejuvenation, eclecticism, bread and dietary fads, physical therapy, and a forecast as to the physician of the future, Boni & Liveright (New York) 1927 and AMS Press (New York) 1977. ISBN0-404-13262-6.
