Starr (1982) and Thomas and Sehnert (1989) report that the role of the physician has dramatically been altered, when comparing history to current times. Starr (1982) reports that the growth of medical authority on the part of in dependent physicians did not come easily, nor without political consequences. In fact, before physicians could transform into a position of high income, autonomy, and other attendant rewards, they confronted during the 1760s to the 1850s, tension between their aspirations and political resistance. Note the following.
In the nineteenth century, many Americans, epitomized by the Populists, continued to believe in the adequacy of common sense and to resist the claims of the professions. On the other hand, there were those, like the Progressives, who believed that science provided the means of moral as well as political reform and who saw in the professions a new and more advanced basis of order. The Progressive view, always stated as a disinterested ideal, nevertheless happily coincided with the ambitions of the emerging professional class to cure and reform. The cultural triumph of Progressivism, which proved more lasting than its political victories, was inseparable from the rise in status and power of professionals in new occupations and organizational hierarchies. Yet this was no simple usurpation; the new authority of professionals reflected the instability of a new way of life and its challenge to traditional belief. The less one could believe "one's own eyes" --new world of science continually prompted that feeling --the more receptive one became to seeing the world through the eyes of those who claimed specialized, technical knowledge, validated by communities of their peers (Starr, 1982, 19).
Following this transformation of medical authority, there was a shift in the role of independent physicians, as well as a shift in the role of their atte...