Physician Birth in Gila River Detention Center
Over a decade ago as a faculty member at Nebraska I was working on a birth origin project. I was mapping the physician birth origins in the AMA Masterfile data on 900,000 physicians. Some were easy to map by city and state to a county location or zip code of birth. Others were more difficult as their towns of origin no longer existed. Two physicians were listed as born in 1942 at Rivers, Arizona. My search for the town of Rivers came up empty. This was not unusual, but I dug deeper into the past. The trail led to Gila River and finally to a visit to the place where these two physicians were born and where dozens of others spent time in the 1940s. Birth Origin Project Summary Generally those with exclusive, most urban, or foreign birth have a much greater chance at becoming a US physician. Rural origin, lower income county birth, birth in a county without a medical school, and birth in the US all decrease probability of becoming a physician. Ethnicity i...