American Medical Association

The largest professional association of physicians and medical students in the United States, founded on 7 May 1847 in Philadelphia at a National Medical Convention, growing out of an 1845 resolution by Dr. Nathan S. Davis calling for a national medical convention. Davis is generally credited as the association's founding father and became the first editor of its flagship publication, the Journal of the American Medical Association, launched in 1883. Its founding goals were to raise and standardize medical education, establish a formal code of medical ethics, advance scientific medicine and improve public health. The association's own historical materials also acknowledge a documented history of racially exclusionary practice toward Black physicians for much of its first century.