Foreign medical graduates.

Although rumblings of discontent regarding Foreign Medical Graduates (FMGs) had echoed in the past despite establishment of the examination of the Educational Council for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG), in the summer of 1974 the heat became intense as far as FMGs were concerned. In June, sequential articles on the subject (the second accompanied by an editorial) appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine ; July found a trilogy of essays inThe Journal, and more was yet to come. Much of the worry had two sources. First, the rapidly increasing influx of alien physicians had come from the Far East and Middle East where barriers of language and customs made difficult their adjustment to United States ways. Second, amendments to the immigration law in 1965 and 1970 opened wide the doors to immigrant physicians and permitted them to stay regardless of their facility with the English language and regardless of