Nearly a century has passed since the American Medical Association endorsed “periodic medical examinations of apparently healthy persons.”
These examinations were “designed to detect the early evidence of disorder before discomfort, inconvenience, interference with work, or anxiety [had] driven [apparently healthy people] to seek medical advice for the treatment of established disease,” Haven Emerson, MD, chair of the AMA’s Committee on Health and Public Instruction, wrote in JAMA in 1922.