Cabal backed Abraham Flexner, an educator, built our modern medical mafia
The Flexner Report ― 100 Years Later
Thomas P. Duffy, MD
The Flexner Report of 1910 transformed the nature and process of medical education in America with a resulting elimination of proprietary schools and the establishment of the biomedical model as the gold standard of medical training. This transformation occurred in the aftermath of the report, which embraced scientific knowledge and its advancement as the defining ethos of a modern physician. Such an orientation had its origins in the enchantment with German medical education that was spurred by the exposure of American educators and physicians at the turn of the century to the university medical schools of Europe. American medicine profited immeasurably from the scientific advances that this system allowed, but the hyper-rational system of German science created an imbalance in the art and science of medicine. A catching-up is under way to realign the professional commitment of the physician with a revision of medical education to achieve that purpose.
Keywords: Abraham Flexner, William Welch, William Osler, Simon Flexner, Johns Hopkins, William Gates, William Pritchett, German Medical Training, full-time system, Carnegie Foundation, John D. Rockefeller, Theodor Billroth, medical professionalism
In the middle of the 17th century, an extraordinary group of scientists and natural philosophers coalesced as the Oxford Circle and created a scientific revolution in the study and understanding of the brain and consciousness. Thomas Willis, a student of William Harvey, Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, and Robert Hooke were synergetic with one another in a shared scientific exploration. Christopher Wren’s subsequent splendid achievement in the architectural design of St Paul’s and other cathedrals resonated with Willis’s delineation of the structure and function of the brain [1].
THE HOPKINS CIRCLE
A similar combustion of shared thought and imagination occurred at the beginning of the 20th century when a group of men who comprised what may be called the Hopkins Circle joined in a project that altered the course of medical education in America. They erected an edifice, not of bricks and mortar, but an edifice that became the system of medical education that we know more than a century later. Their successful efforts resulted in the science-based foundation of medical training that has made the United States the recognized leader in medical education and medical research today. Much of the credit for this transformation has been appropriately attributed to Abraham Flexner and his critique of medical education contained in his Flexner Report of 1910 [2]. The contributions of several other members of the Hopkins Circle should not be overlooked, nor the importance of the synergy that the Circle generated underestimated.
ABRAHAM FLEXNER, THE EDUCATOR AND REFORMER
The final member of the Circle was Abraham Flexner, a former school teacher and expert on educational practices whose background and training made him an outlier in the Circle. He was the sixth of seven siblings in a Louisville, Kentucky, Jewish family whose father was a struggling but unsuccessful business man. Education and being well educated had become the secular faith that replaced religious orthodoxy for Abraham and most of his siblings. He was able to attend Johns Hopkins University through a gift and beneficence of his older brother, Simon, who was then a pharmacist in Louisville and later achieved great eminence as the head of the Rockefeller Institute.
-—-
CONCLUSION
There was maldevelopment in the structure of medical education in America in the aftermath of the Flexner Report. The profession’s infatuation with the hyper-rational world of German medicine created an excellence in science that was not balanced by a comparable excellence in clinical caring. Flexner’s corpus was all nerves without the life blood of caring. Osler’s warning that the ideals of medicine would change as “teacher and student chased each other down the fascinating road of research, forgetful of those wider interests to which a hospital must minister” [18] has proven prescient and wise. We have learned that scientific medicine must travel linked to a professional ethos of caring that has been in place in our oaths and aspirations. Cross-talk must occur between the two with a bi-directional bedside to bench dialogue. This creates the frisson that animates the quest for breakthroughs in a medical realm. The revisions in medical education that are now taking place are re-claiming the rightful eminence of the service component of medicine ― the centerpiece of the doctor-patient relationship. The Flexner model remains in place, the foundation of the magnificent edifice that is American medicine.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3178858/