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The FLEXNER REPORT MEDICAL EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA. A report to the Carnegie Foundation for the advancement of teaching by Bulletin Number 4. D. 8.Updike, The Merrymount press, Boston. Copywrite 1910

This report was commissioned in 1908 and was two years in the making. There are two reprints in the UCSF Medical Library with the call letters R 743, F 62, 1910.

After an excellent introduction by Henry S Prichet , Part 1 gives the background and the history of how the Medical education reached its sorry state. It discusses the proper and actual bases of Medical education. It then presnts ideal curricula culled from the best of the Medical Schools and the financial aspects of medical education. (180 pages)

Part 2 examines the state of medical education in every State of the Union and in Canada giving details of the good and the bad parts of all of it. In preparing for Part 2, Dr. Flexner or a collegue visited every ”Medical School” in the USA and in Canada. Each is described by name and type, entrance requirements, attendance, teaching staff, resources available for maintenance, lab and clinical facilites. Each was evaluated.

It is important to note that Dr. Flexner did not discuss the means by which the reform was to occur. That was the job of the Executive, Legislative, and Judical branches of Government working with Organized Medicine.

This fantastic document presented a pattern for Action that changed the teaching of Medicine by diploma mills to that provided by the best Medical Schools in the world: it changed the practice of Medicine from to that carried out by the best trained physicians in the world. No small contribution!

This is the kind of study required for the much needed reform of the Criminal Justice System in the United States.