Stuff You Should Know How the Flexner Report Changed Medicine
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Feb 19, 2026 A look at how a 1910 review upended medical training and reshaped U.S. medicine. They trace 19th-century trade-like schools to a German research model and Johns Hopkins reforms. The report’s bias against proprietary, Black, and women’s schools gets examined. Philanthropy, rising costs, and tensions between lab science and humanistic care are explored.
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Medical Education Was Chaotic Pre-Flexner
- Pre-Flexner American medical schools were numerous, underfunded, and often taught by part-time faculty with minimal clinical training.
- Abraham Flexner set Johns Hopkins (German model) as the ideal, demanding full-time research faculty and rigorous, hands-on four-year curricula.
Flexner Walked Every Campus
- Flexner personally inspected every medical school in the U.S. and Canada, visiting 155 schools over 18 months.
- He categorized schools as acceptable, improvable with funding, or hopelessly deficient and recommended many closures.
Massive Consolidation Of Medical Schools
- Flexner recommended cutting U.S. medical schools from 155 to about 31 and closed most proprietary and alternative schools.
- This purge centralized medical education around university-affiliated, science-focused institutions.