[Report of a Committee read before the American Academy of Medicine at New York, October 10, 1883.
The progress made in the legislative restriction of medical practice in the United States since your Committee was appointed, three years ago, to report upon the subject, has been both notable and salutary. At that time the propriety of establishing such laws was under active discussion, and weak enactments, temporizing in character and but partially effective in their action, were evoked from tardy and timorous legislators in several of the States of this country, as compromises between a sense of the necessity of doing something to protect the health of their constituents and a consciousness that the practitioners and supporters of quackery and of irregular methods of medical treatment were among the influential voters whose active opposition might jeopardize their reelection. It was also found to be impossible, in a few of the