oversight of the quality of classes and labs. They added more clinical time and experiences. Additionally, Flexner facilitated the upgrade of the teaching college curriculum at Columbia University, influencing other graduate schools. Medical care and investigational research both prospered from this approach. He founded and directed Princeton’ s Institute for Advanced Studies. We are all the beneficiaries.
Despite this productive history, there is a lesser acknowledged, negative and maybe partly hidden aspect of Abraham Flexner and his Flexner Report. He and the Report are noted as being overtly racist and sexist. This bias is not well publicized, nor widely known, but evidences the dominant, stereotypic cultural attitudes of white male society and physicians in early 1900s medical practice.
So far as racism: Flexner recommended closing all medical institutions historically open to African American students, except for Howard University and Meharry Medical College. That included even ending our own Louisville National Medical College. It nearly eliminated physician education for African Americans. He is said to have wanted Black physicians only to treat Black patients, be subservient – as health advocates – limiting contagion to protect the white community and practice in limited numbers. These ideas limited patient access and conformed to a segregated and staggeringly unequal medical system that also demeaned Black doctors with a persistent and pernicious effect.
The Flexner Report thus was detrimental to African American people‘ s health care, physician education and social status. While there has been a decrease in public discrimination in recent decades, by no means is it gone – too much still exists today.
The Association of American Medical Colleges had previously offered an Abraham Flexner Award; however, in 2020, because of his social beliefs, they removed his name to become the AAMC Award for Excellence in Medical Education. Despite this history, it seems that the University of Kentucky potentially can still internally confer honor with Abraham Flexner Master Educator Awards.
Regarding women: Flexner noted that there were few women physicians, and he reportedly thought they did not really want to be doctors. This was indicated despite a then-present upsurge in women-created medical schools for female applicants. Over time, lots of these institutions were closed and female students were rarely admitted to medical education. He reportedly suggested that most women doctors should select to practice in gynecology, obstetrics, pediatrics and / or occupational health.
Johns Hopkins University was early at accepting female medical students; yet it opened such enrollment only after a group of wealthy women promised financial support during a major economic shortage crisis that had threatened to derail the opening of this medical school. These women mandated that their money would flow to start a Johns Hopkins medical institution if – and only if – admission opened to women and stayed open. That worked, and matriculation to U. S. medical education is now more available and accessible to women. Lots of women nowadays are practicing physicians: in fact, women have made up the majority of the UofL School of Medicine classes often over the past years – the class of 2026, for instance, is 61 % female( put that in your pipe and smoke it, Flexner sir).
Dr. Lippmann is a retired psychiatry professor from the University of Louisville School of Medicine. Subsequently, he regularly provides primary medical care practice at the Family Community Clinic, clinically mentors lots of students, residents and international medical graduate physicians and teaches scientific medical writing seminars.
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