1910

Publication of Abraham Flexner’s report on medical education in U.S. & Canada, under auspices of Henry Pritchett and the Carnegie Foundation (Bonner II, 66-68). Bonner stresses the degree to which Flexner “stood at the vortex of swiftly moving scientific, educational, and philanthropic currents that strongly favored reform,” including the reform-dominated Council on Medical Education of the AMA (73, 88). In writing the report, his brother Simon, then of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, was his “most reliable and helpful critic,” though he also received draft feedback from Pritchett and Hopkins anatomist Franklin Mall (82). Flexner judged two-thirds of the 155 medical schools (5 in Canada) he visited “utterly hopeless” (71). Only Hopkins, Harvard, and Western Reserve received clean bills of health, and only Hopkins “won unstinted praise” (79), though much of the achievement of reform “was less the result of the stick of sanction than of the carrot of foundation subsidy implicit in the Flexner visits” (Stevens, 66-73). Further, Flexner’s twin goals of medicine as a public service and scientific excellence in medical education did not always coincide: “One serious and long-term result of standardization was the closure of schools for black physicians” (Stevens, 71). He surveyed seven black med schools, giving passing grades to two and a marginal pass to one and failing the other four (Long, 158). “Neither Flexner nor the white philanthropists who followed his advice believe in making medical schools for blacks the equal of medical schools for whites. While white schools should focus on scientific medicine and research, Howard and Meharry should focus on sanitation and hygiene (Ward, 26). University of Pennsylvania “in some respects” ranked behind Hopkins, Harvard, Michigan and was not a major beneficiary of grant support from Rockefeller-supported General Education Board (Corner, 231-32).