California Medical Association

The California Medical Association (CMA) is a professional organization representing more than 43,000 physicians in the state of California. The organization was founded in 1856 and is a constituent organization of the American Medical Association.

The CMA is dedicated to serving its member physicians through a comprehensive program of legislative, legal, regulatory, economic and social advocacy. The CMA's goal is to provide members with the necessary support, so that they can surpass the challenges and continue to run successful medical practices.

The CMA and its leaders:

On 12 March 1856, the Medical Society of the State of California held its first meeting at Pioneer Hall on J Street in what is now Old Town Sacramento. The society's first president, Benjamin Franklin Keene, M.D.—also a state senator representing El Dorado County—led the meeting of 1875.

After the 1850 cholera outbreak in Sacramento, the surviving physicians became close colleagues and friends, and began to found county medical societies. The first were founded in Sacramento and San Francisco. Each society kept in contact, and society secretaries Thomas Logan, M.D., (Sacramento) and Elias Cooper, M.D., (San Francisco)—historical figures in their own right—set up that landmark first meeting in 1856. Dr. Logan, a notable medical scholar, would later reform the CMA after years of strife, reorganizing the society in 1875 and eventually serving as the state’s Director of Public Health as well as president of the CMA and then the American Medical Association. Dr. Cooper, an eye surgeon and co-founder of the Illinois Medical Society previously, would found the medical school that became Stanford University School of Medicine.

Controversy arose over which physicians were credible, and as a result a credentials committee formed to "prevent admissions of improper persons." Dr. Morse became the Medical Society’s first Censor, a precursor to the Medical Board of California of today.

In the early years, travel was difficult, so that the society's focus remained in Northern California, and its counterpart, the Southern California Medical Society, was not created until 1898. County societies sprouted up throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s. In 1900, CMA membership cost $10 and included malpractice coverage. In 1923, the society renamed itself the California Medical Association to comply with name changes at other state medical associations and the American Medical Association.

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