Intro
The Report
The Forward
The Carnegie Foundation
Framing the Problem
The AMA
Centralization
Money Over Health
Other Folks Involved
Wrap Up
Intro
To look at an organization you have to understand its roots. The situations and ideas that gave birth to it. For example, I served in the U.S. Marine Corps, and the Corps was founded in a bar known as Tun Tavern in the 1700s. A military organization founded in a bar should tell you a great deal about its culture…
What about our current medical system? One that focuses primarily on giving people pills to suppress symptoms while sometimes using surgery to suppress symptoms but never trying to understand the root cause. The lack of addressing the root cause has resulted in younger demographics being diagnosed with various illnesses that groups of similar age in the past didn’t deal with. This, assuming that these tests aren’t designed to trigger false positives…
This series will be focused on the pivot point. A document that influenced this country to travel down this road I call industrial medicine.
This was, The Flexner Report1.
The Report
“THE present report on medical education forms the first of a series of papers on professional schools to be issued by the Carnegie Foundation. The preparation of these papers has grown naturally out of the situation with which the trustees of the Foundation were confronted when they took up the trust committed to them.” (p 6)
This report was brought together by Abraham Flexner in 1910. Writing a report that changes the way medical personnel are trained thereby influencing how the average citizen is treated you’d think they’d get someone whose specialty was in the same field they were trying to influence right?
Flexner was a psychologist who completed his graduate studies at Harvard while his undergrad was at Johns Hopkins in the Classics. He had one sister and three brothers two of which (Simon and Jacob Flexner) were the only actual doctors. Being a psychologist he for a time experimented with alternate ways of teaching classes of students through his, “Lincoln School” in New York.
Some of his thoughts on education can be found in his various essays2.
“If, for example, only so much arithmetic is taught as people actually have occasion to use, the subject will shrink to modest proportions; and if this reduced amount is taught so as to serve real purposes, the teachers of science, industry, and domestic economy will do much of it incidentally.” - Flexner
Seems pretty straightforward to me. Focus on the subjects that folks use in real life.
However, this school was funded by John D Rockefeller and his two sons attended this school3. The elites and their children get actual education while us plebs get compulsory schooling which is designed to stunt our intellectual growth…
If you want more on this subject I’d suggest that you look up, John Taylor Gatto. There are many talks of his on YouTube.
But Abraham Flexner never had medical patients. He never brought a person back from the brink of death with his knowledge of biology and various medical procedures. How was someone with so little experience in such manners, given the power to change the field of medicine?
Throughout the rest of the series, you’ll hear the names of the same oligarchs and their foundations brought up time and time again. Some call it philanthropy and it might be the case. But we need to leave room for other explanations too.
The Forward
The report starts off with a forward. This forward was written by Henry S Pritchett who was a president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching for 25 years starting in 1906. The quotes you see in this post will mostly be from this guy. Flexner caught Henry’s eye due to his progressive stance on teaching so he employed him to write this report in order to reform all the medical schools in the country.
Was Henry S Pritchett a doctor then?
He was an astronomer.
This is kinda weird. Why is a dude who looks at stars teaming up with a dude who studies minds, powered by philanthropists, changing the medical field?
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