History of Healthcare Part 11: The Flexner Report

Once the AMA and William Welch orchestrated an alliance of Progressive reformers, corporate interests, and state medical licensing agencies, it was time to sanctify the cogs of a new medical system.  That is what the Flexner Report is all about, a survey of US medical schools largely scripted by the AMA, conducted by a little known educator working for the Carnegie Corporation named Abraham Flexner, and financed by complicit corporations.  The Report entirely transformed the American healthcare system into one that focused on lab rats over clinicians, number measurement over patient-centered care, and a dogmatic top-down system run entirely by the AMA and financed by corporations.  The report closed most medical schools and required the surviving one to use corporate funds to transform into lab-based institutions.  Students would now be taken out of the clinical realm and be placed in the classroom and lab where they would learn about tests and drugs and German medicine, transforming healthcare into more of a technical field than one of critical thinking, humanism, and dynamic science.  Those who complied received higher salaries and status.  Those who did not were excluded from the healthcare landscape.  Poor William Osler protested from England, but his vision for medical care evaporated once the report's findings became the new norm.