The Legacy of Abraham Flexner
Abraham Flexner Abraham Flexner was born on November 13, 1866. He was an American educator, best known for his role in the 20th century reform of medical and higher education in the United States and Canada.
Flexner was born in
Louisville, Kentucky on November 13, 1866. He was the sixth of nine children
born to German Jewish immigrants, Ester and Moritz Flexner. He was the first in
his family to complete high school and go on to college. In 1886, at age 19, Flexner
completed a B.A. in classics at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied for
only two years. In 1905, he pursued graduate studies in psychology at Harvard
University, and at the University of Berlin. He did not, however, complete work
on an advanced degree at either institution.
After founding and directing
a college-preparatory school in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, Flexner
published a critical assessment of the state of the American educational system
in 1908 titled The American College: A Criticism. Flexner was also a founder of
the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which brought together some of
the greatest minds in history to collaborate on intellectual discovery and
research. His work attracted the Carnegie Foundation to
commission an in-depth evaluation into 155 medical schools in the US and
Canada. It was his resultant self-titled Flexner Report, published in 1910,
that sparked the reform of medical education in the United States and Canada.
The Flexner Report is a book-length
landmark report on medical education in the United States and Canada, written
by Abraham Flexner and published in 1910 under the aegis of the Carnegie
Foundation. Many aspects of the present-day American medical profession stem
from the Flexner Report and its aftermath.
The Flexner Report was unsparing in its
criticism. Flexner said that several of the schools were “in no position to
make any contribution of value” and called them “beyond repair.”
The Report (also called
Carnegie Foundation Bulletin Number Four) called on American medical schools to
enact higher admission and graduation standards, and to adhere strictly to the
protocols of mainstream science in their teaching and research.
The report talked about the
need for revamping and centralizing medical institutions. Many American medical
schools fell short of the standard advocated in the Flexner Report and,
subsequent to its publication, nearly half of such schools merged or were
closed outright. Colleges in electrotherapy were closed.
Homeopathy, traditional
osteopathy, eclectic medicine, and physiomedicalism (botanical therapies that
had not been tested scientifically) were derided; some doctors were jailed.
The Report also concluded
that there were too many medical schools in the United States, and that too
many doctors were being trained. A repercussion of the Flexner Report,
resulting from the closure or consolidation of university training, was
reversion of American universities to male-only admittance programs to
accommodate a smaller admission pool. Universities had begun opening and
expanding female admissions as part of women's and co-educational facilities
only in the mid-to-latter part of the 19th century with the founding of
co-educational Oberlin College in 1833 and private colleges such as Vassar
College and Pembroke College.
The deck was particularly
stacked against black medical schools. Their students arrived unprepared for
their studies because they lacked access to decent high school education.
Tuition was substantially lower than the average medical school since most
students couldn’t afford higher fees. Lacking funds, schools couldn’t maintain
or update their equipment or facilities.
In the wave of reforms that
followed, the country’s 148 medical schools were whittled down to sixty-six. Of
the seven schools for African Americans, only two remained standing. Many of
Flexner’s critics “fault him for recommending the retention of just two black
medical schools,” write Miller and Weiss, “when it should have been obvious that
most of the care for the nearly 10 million African Americans would fall to
black health care providers.”
Miller and Weiss point out
that Flexner’s true intentions were “unknowable,” but suggest that Flexner was
somewhat supportive of black medical schools and argued that they should be
held to the same standard as white schools, with consideration given for their
disadvantages in funding and resources. But in practice, the Flexner Report all
but eliminated medical education for African Americans, primarily because the
American Medical Association used the report to advance an agenda that
protected the professional and financial interests of their (white, male)
membership.
The Bambergers, heirs to a
department store fortune, were set on creating a medical school in Newark, New
Jersey that gave admissions preference to Jewish applicants in an effort to
fight the rampant prejudice against Jews in the medical profession at that
time. Flexner informed them that a teaching hospital and other faculties
required a successful school. A few months later, in June 1930, he had
persuaded the Bamberger siblings and their representatives to fund instead the
development of an Institute for Advanced Study.
The Institute was headed by
Flexner from 1930 to 1939 and it possessed a renowned faculty including Kurt
Gödel and John von Neumann.
During his time there,
Flexner helped bring over many European scientists who would likely have
suffered persecution by the rising Nazi government. This included Albert Einstein,
who arrived at the Institute in 1933 under Flexner's directorship.
left to right: Albert
Einstein, Abraham Flexner, John R. Hardin, and Herbert Maass at the Institute
for Advanced Study on May 22, 1939
Abraham Flexner died at the
age of 92 in Falls Church, Virginia.
Jan Ricks Jennings
Senior Executive
Senior Management Resources, LLC
JanJenningsBlog.Blogspot.com
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