Abraham Flexner

Abraham Flexner 1866-1959, American educator, b. Louisville, Ky., grad. Johns Hopkins Univ., 1886. After 19 years as a secondary school teacher and principal, he took graduate work at Harvard and at the Univ. of Berlin. In 1908 he joined the research staff of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and in 1910 wrote a report, Medical Education in the United States and Canada, which is generally called the Flexner Report. It hastened much-needed reforms in the standards, organization, and curriculums of American medical schools. From 1912 to 1925, Flexner was a member of the General Education Board, serving as secretary after 1917. He was director of the newly organized Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton from 1930 to 1939. His influential works on education range from A Modern School (1916) and The Gary Schools (with F. B. Bachman, 1918) to The Burden of Humanism (the Taylorian Lecture at Oxford, 1928) and his widely known study, Universities: American, English, German (1930). His biography of H. S. Pritchett was published in 1943.

Bibliography: See his autobiography (rev. ed. 1960).

Flexner Report (1910).The Flexner Report, an evaluation of American medical education, has become the exemplar of critical investigations of higher education. Abraham Flexner (1866–1959), a nonphysician with little knowledge of medicine or medical training, was employed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, established in 1905 by Andrew Carnegie. The foundation shared the widespread concern that many medical schools were poorly equipped to teach the new discoveries in the medical sciences and clinical medicine. In 1909, under an agreement between the foundation and the American Medical Association (AMA), Flexner participated in the AMA's second inspection of medical schools. Flexner's independently written report won wide publicity because of its descriptions of each medical school in the United States and Canada and its harsh denunciations of the education provided by many of them. The report gained a reputation as having been responsible for the closing of many medical schools, but mergers and closings had been under way for a decade. (Between 1904 and 1910 the number of medical students decreased by one‐fourth.) Flexner also failed to observe that the weakest schools produced few graduates. Using as a model the renowned Johns Hopkins University medical school, which opened in Baltimore in 1893, Flexner advocated laboratory instruction as the principal form of preclinical education and hospital training as the core of clinical training. The former proved to be prohibitively expensive for most medical schools and the latter, which was widely adopted after midcentury, has been criticized for neglecting ambulatory patients and their social environment.
See also Education: The Rise of the University; Medicine: From the 1870s to 1945.

Bibliography

Abraham Flexner , Medical Education in the United States and Canada, 1910.
William G. Rothstein , American Medical Schools and the Practice of Medicine: A History, 1987.

William G. Rothstein