SOME weeks ago I received a letter from a member of the Academy asking why the Advisory Committee of the American Board of Pediatrics had refused him permission to take the examination regularly offered in the subspecialty of Pediatric Allergy. The reason the Board of Pediatrics had given him, so he wrote, was that they considered he had not had sufficient training in allergy. Recently also the Executive Board of the American Academy of Pediatrics has had criticisms of our society because, so it is stated, we allow another society to determine who our members shall be. We should abolish the regulation that Board membership should have anything to do with Academy membership. We should establish our own standards without reference to the standards of any other group. Also recently, criticisms of the American Board of Pediatrics have been made to our officers. It is stated that too many well qualified pediatricians fail; that many have to wait years before they have a chance to take the Board examinations; that it is not right to ask an applicant who has failed his examination, has a good practice, a dependent family, to take a year more of training before he is eligible to take the examination again. I shall take up these different implications and criticisms one at a time in this one letter, for they in a sense are all related. In answering the question raised in the first paragraph, I called to the attention of the writer the fact that the Academy, as such, has no power, nor does it wish to assume any, over the policies of the American Board of Pediatrics.
Paul W. Beaven (Fri,) studied this question.