The Flexner Report
The so-called "Flexner Report," issued in 1910, was a game-changer in American medical education.
Previously, a man — or woman — could become a physician by sitting through a winter's worth of lectures at a "medical school," which might be some doctor's parlor. Only the more rigorous schools survived after 1910 — all the women's medical schools and most of those that accepted minority candidates closed.
Abraham Flexner
Candidates had to qualify for the schools that remained, and they spent years, not months, learning the craft, which began to include hands-on training with patients. All these innovations impacted the birth story.
Abraham Flexner, who wrote the report for the Carnegie Foundation, was primarily an educator. He got his start with a private laboratory school he founded in his native Louisville, Ky., after graduation from Johns Hopkins University, and wrote a book in 1908, The American College, that brought him national attention.
Flexner was deeply involved in re-structuring the nation's medical schools in the years leading up to World War I. Later, he was the first director of the Institute for Advanced Study, a colossally influential "think tank," founded in 1930 in Princeton, N.J., by Newark retailer Louis Bamberger and his sister Caroline Bamberger Fuld.
At the IAS, Flexner saw opportunity in the political clouds gathering over Europe, recruiting scientists like John von Newmann and Kurt Godel. And, Flexner personally wrote the letter that brought Albert Einstein to the United States in 1933.
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[...] his medical degree from the two-year program at the University of Louisville. His younger brother Abraham, a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins University, arranged for Simon to study pathology there under [...]
[...] Abraham Flexner, the author of a report that re-structured American medical education, and his brother Simon, who headed up the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, were two of the most influential men of their day. But they owed their success to some degree to their older brother Jacob. [...]