- Person
- Abraham Flexner
- Lived
- 1866–1959
- Field
- Education reform
- From
- American
The story
Abraham Flexner was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1866 to German Jewish immigrants and grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home. He studied classics at Johns Hopkins University and became a schoolmaster, running an experimental school in Louisville. In 1908 his book criticising American colleges caught the attention of Henry Pritchett of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, who asked him to survey medical education, even though Flexner was not a doctor.
Flexner visited every one of the 155 medical schools then operating in North America. Many were small for-profit businesses owned by local doctors, with weak or no entrance requirements, few laboratories and little or no contact with hospital patients. Only 16 of them required two or more years of university study before admission.
His report, Medical Education in the United States and Canada, published by the Carnegie Foundation in 1910, held up Johns Hopkins as the model. It called for medical schools to be part of universities, to demand a scientific education before admission, to teach anatomy, physiology and other basic sciences in proper laboratories, to train students on hospital wards under full-time teachers, and for state boards to license only properly trained doctors.
Backed by state licensing laws and Rockefeller philanthropy, the reforms spread quickly. Many weak schools merged or closed, and by 1920, 92 percent of American medical schools required at least two years of university study for entry. Medical training became grounded in research and in sciences such as physiology and biochemistry, and the quality of physicians rose markedly.
The reforms also had costs. Rural schools disappeared, and five of the seven medical schools for African Americans closed, sharply limiting where Black Americans could train as doctors; the report also contains racist passages typical of its era. In 2020 the Association of American Medical Colleges renamed an award that had carried Flexner's name. Yet the basic structure he championed, a scientific education followed by supervised clinical training, remains the foundation of medical education across North America.
Why it matters
Patients across North America are treated by doctors trained in the science-based, hospital-centred system that Flexner's report set in motion.
About Abraham Flexner
Louisville schoolmaster whose 1910 report remade North American medical schools around science and hospital training, and who founded Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, a haven for Einstein.
Sources
- Flexner Report Wikipedia
- The Flexner Report: 100 Years Later Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine (PubMed Central)
- Abraham Flexner Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.