Building a Longitudinal, Physician-Level Dataset from American Medical Directories

Ben Chrisinger, Tufts University
Sean M. Smith, Rice University

American Medical Directories (AMDs), periodically published by the American Medical Association from 1906, present an immense opportunity to illuminate the organizational dynamics of professional medicine in the early twentieth century. In addition to physicians’ names and practice locations, these volumes also contain valuable information about individuals’ training histories and medical specializations, demographic characteristics, and membership in state and local societies. AMDs’ periodic publication also presents an opportunity to link individuals over time, exploring physicians’ movement and where medical training pipelines developed. No other data source offers such nuanced, individual-level information about the early medical workforce, yet AMDs remain underexplored archival sources, largely due to the difficulties of extracting large quantities of data from original archival sources. In this paper, we introduce a new effort to digitize AMDs between 1906 and 1938 and build a novel, longitudinal dataset of the medical workforce across significant demographic and cultural moments that likely interrupt previous patterns, including the Flexner Report, the Great Migration, and World War I. This project will provide a throughline from the early days of professional medicine in the US and produce a publicly available database that will put AMD data into the hands of social science researchers and the broader public, demonstrate its utility by exploring a set of sociological hypotheses, and sustainably archive them for future generations. In particular, this effort will enable a new perspective on one plausible cause of racial health disparities in the first half of the twentieth century: namely, inequity in educational opportunities.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 185. Building Data Infrastructure