Historical Flexner

In spite of the ratification of the 13th and 14th Amendments, newly freed African Americans still faced inequality following the Civil War, including that within education. With the introduction of Jim Crow laws in the South, schools and colleges were among the institutions mandated to segregate blacks into “separate but equal” facilities; very rarely were these schools and educations equal. The poorer state of primary schooling for black students would naturally leave them in a much more difficult position to be accepted to college, if they were even allowed an opportunity to apply. In the face of these racially discriminating options, the only schools to receive an equivalent education that trained African American doctors were Historical …show more content…
Prior to being called on to inspect the medical education system in the states, Flexner toured Europe, examining the education models of Great Britain, France and Germany. Germany’s model to the sciences piqued his interest as an educator. In lieu of studying medicine for the sake of improving patient care, the Germans focussed on medicine in the lense of a science. Their mark of excellence was more so focussed on a physician’s ability to contribute to the collective knowledge-base of the field. German medicine was not interested in hospice nor doctor-patient relationships; patient care was seen more as a means to further the limits of the field, not the ends in which research was necessarily synthesized for. Notably, it was the approach that John Hopkins, Flexner’s alma mater and benefactor, adopted ten years prior to the report: a benchmark to which he’d judge the rest of American medical education …show more content…
Such was primarily caused by the measures the AMA imposed as a national standard during the turn of the 19th century in conjunction with the Flexner Report of 1910. According to a 1996 study carried out by Miriam Komaromy M.D., “Communities with high proportions of black and Hispanic residents were four times as likely as others to have a shortage of physicians, regardless of community income” (p. 1305). Additionally, “Black physicians practiced in areas where the percentage of black residents was nearly five times as high, on average, as in areas where other physicians practiced”(p. 1305). While Flexner himself hasn’t disseminated the racist beliefs many non-black doctors may unknowingly harbor, his closing of a majority of Black Colleges teaching medicine (as of 1910) has arguably made its consequences more prevalent. In lieu of a sufficient amount of trusted health care professionals serving a community, a black person may have to choose between not consulting a physician, consulting one that may not be able to invest the time into them, or consulting a white physician (which may not be available to them) and running the risk of substandard care due to persisting false