Monitoring a “Menace”: Peer Review and the Regulation of Substance-Addicted Doctors, 1933-1948.

This article examines the first power that Victorian parliamentarians granted to the Medical Board of Victoria (Board) to regulate impaired doctors. Convinced that substance-addicted doctors were a “menace”, in 1933 the legislature gave the Board discretion to remove their names from its register of “legally qualified medical practitioners”. In the next 15 years, however, the Board chose not to cancel the registration of several doctors who came to its attention for their addiction to alcohol or drugs and instead the Board monitored those doctors; it mostly sought assurances from the practitioners that they were obtaining treatment for their addiction, abstaining from consuming alcohol and drugs, and refraining from practising medicine, usually until their treating practitioners considered that they were fit to resume medical practice. This article evaluates the benefits and pitfalls of the Board’s regulation of these doctors, including in light of Anglo-American legal scholars’ discussion at that time about the merits of the growth of administrative agencies and their work. The article then considers the lessons that can be learnt from this history about how substance-dependent doctors should be regulated and who should be involved in decision-making regarding their regulation.