Changes

====Imposing New Ethical Standards====In 1895, Oregon again altered its medical licensing law by requiring all applicants to pass a licensing exam. The 1895 amendment also expanded the power of the Oregon Medical Board to revoke the license of a physician for unprofessional or dishonorable conduct including any physician who was originally exempted in the first law. Soon thereafter, the Oregon board immediately targeted physicians in the state. The 1895 statute specified the grounds for unprofessional or dishonorable conduct: Taking part in a criminal abortion, employing “cappers” and “steerers,” obtaining a fee and claiming the ability to cure an incurable disease or condition, betraying a professional secret, using untruthful or improbable statements in advertisements, conviction of any offense involving moral turpitude and habitual intemperance, and advertising medicines claiming to regulate the monthly periods of women.

State medical boards throughout the country were adopting similar licensing criteria. Before 1890, only nine states adopted codes of ethics, but during the 1890s, twenty-four more states developed codes of conduct for physicians. These codes governed what grounds could be used by the board either to deny a license or revoke one after issuance. These ethics rules often included laws that barred physicians from performing abortions. Typically, “the exercise of the same wide discretion cannot be extended to a case where, when one has been regularly admitted, the revocation of his license is sought under another independent provision of the statute.” Like Oregon’s, these codes typically barred unprofessional or dishonorable conduct, procuring abortions, gross immorality, false statements and promises, false advertising, distributing indecent and obscene material, and the fraudulent use of diplomas. Several of these criteria were similar to those adopted by the Illinois board in the 1880s.

The In one case, the Oregon Medical Board enforced its ethics code and revoked the license of an Astoria physician, Otis Burnett Estes, for providing an abortion. Estes was a Regular physician and a graduate of College of Physicians and Surgeons at St. Joseph, Missouri. Estes had been described in the community as “Daddy Estes” because he had delivered more than two-thousand-five-hundred babies around Astoria, Oregon. Estes’s was convicted in the Oregon criminal court of performing an illegal abortion. After his conviction, a local Astoria physician, Dr. Oswald Beckman, filed a complaint against Estes with the state medical board. At the hearing, the full board heard the case against Estes. The prosecution questioned three witnesses at the hearing: Sophia Schultz and two other Astorian physicians. Schultz was Estes’s patient and she recanted her earlier testimony and stated that Estes had not performed an abortion. Estes’s counsel introduced sixty-four affidavits from Astorian citizens in support of the physician. Despite Estes’s support and Schultz’s testimony, the full board revoked Estes’s license.