Self correction. The report was published in 1910 and done at the behest of the Rockefellers, Andrew Carnegie, et. al. The American system afterwards was set up, yes, to reflect the German methods that developed in the later 19th century. (This in part led to WWII, but that’s a story for another time.)

https://www.cancertutor.com/flexner-report/

If you’ve ever wondered how modern-day medicine got to where it is today, you should begin by learning about Abraham Flexner. He’s probably one of the most influential men no one has ever heard of.

In 1910 he published the book-length report Medical Education in the United States and Canada which is now known as the Flexner Report. And, the rest, as they say, is history.

Abraham Flexner was not a doctor, but this school teacher and educational theorist from Louisville, Kentucky, has had a more significant impact on modern medicine than just about anyone else.

Though institutions such as Johns Hopkins were already implementing “modern principles” into their work, most medical schools had yet to subscribe to these paradigms.

So what Flexner did was to attempt to align medical education under a set of norms that emphasized laboratory research and the patenting of medicine — both of which would serve to further enrich the estates of the entrepreneurs who funded Flexner’s 1910 report: John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and others.

Sounds like a win-win, right? … Well, not exactly.

In fact, chances are that if Flexner had not submitted his report that audited medical schools in the United States and Canada, we would not have a society heavily biased in favor of many inhumane and unnatural medical practices that we have today.

Should there have been more accountability for medical practitioners in North America? Probably. Should that accountability come from the oil industry and others who saw the domination of medicine as another way to amass wealth? That seems to be a conflict of interest, to put it mildly.

Dr. Thomas P. Duffy in the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine offered this analysis of Flexner’s approach:

“There was maldevelopment in the structure of medical education in America in the aftermath of the Flexner Report. The profession’s infatuation with the hyper-rational world of German medicine created an excellence in science that was not balanced by a comparable excellence in clinical caring. Flexner’s corpus was all nerves without the life blood of caring. Osler’s warning that the ideals of medicine would change as ‘teacher and student chased each other down the fascinating road of research, forgetful of those wider interests to which a hospital must minister’ has proven prescient and wise.”

But isn’t this sort of what you’d expect when an evil genius — all intellect, no compassion — like Rockefeller determines the future of medical education and care?

Of course, it’s not just the research that modern medicine is after. While notoriety for the latest “breakthroughs” certainly drives most medicine, money is the ultimate determiner of access and availability of treatments.

And getting back to the connection between the robber barons and medicine, why did Rockefeller et al have such an interest in medical education? One possible reason could’ve been their interest in peddling pharmaceuticals that began as byproducts of oil refinement.

Health journalist S.D. Wells notes in the eBook 25 Amazing (and Disturbing) Facts About the Hidden History of Medicine, “Five score and two years ago, a man named Abraham Flexner was hired by John D. Rockefeller to evaluate the effectiveness of therapies being taught by medical colleges and institutions, with the ultimate goal of dominating control over pharmaceuticals.

“With partnerships including Andrew Carnegie and JP Morgan, a new “doorkeeper” would exist to influence legislative bodies on state and federal levels to create regulations and licensing “red tape” that strictly promoted drug medicine while stifling and shutting down alternative, inexpensive natural remedies. Those medical colleges and institutions that did not submit to this superpower of regulation were crushed and put out of business.

“The Flexner report was conveniently titled Medical Education in the United States and Canada and the 22 page control ‘mechanism’ was more or less a teamsters union, and medical schools in the U.S. were cut in half by the Flexner Report in less than 15 years, from 160 to 80, and then down below 70 by World War II. This concentrated control is the direct cause of the majority of problems with health care today.”

Flexner elevated the importance of medical research to a status of near infallibility as he helped import and institute German educational methods in the teaching of medicine.

This brought many needed improvements to medical students’ practical field experience through hands-on learning, but it also built in a strong bias in favor of empirical science (i.e. pharmaceutical drugs) to the exclusion of whole-patient care or any of the more natural treatment options.

Sound familiar? Have you ever experienced this in your journey of medical care? A doctor who threw you a bottle of science while only skimming the surface of your overall health?

Flexner helped pave the way for a medical monopoly that persists to this day. Modern medicine has become such a systemic force that none of this is really shocking to you, right? Of course, drugs are patented. Of course, they’re expensive and controlled by a select group of companies and government agencies. Of course, we can’t use plants as medicine. That’s quackery!

I first came across the using industrial chemicals as part of treatment in a Eustace Mullins book. IIRC, it’s titled Murder by Injection. There A LOT of disturbing information there.

The reason I know about this is in working for one of the medical schools here, the Flexner Report and its aftermath was a big historic milestone in one of the schools as being when they got their act together. (The other one was rated much higher then.) It’s also when the oesteopathy schools took a hit and closed. I’ve seen references to that being about the time chiropractic was labeled “quackery” as well as herbal medicines being witchcraft.

It has to be all related. The cancer site I quote claims it was all the robber barons after centralized profit, which is true on its own right, but I suspect there were larger forces at work.