You're listening to Well Now,

you're listening to Well Now,

Slate's podcast about health and wellness.

I'm Maya Feller.

And I'm Kavita Patel. For most people the name Abraham Flexner doesn't mean much.

But for me and thousands of physicians that went to medical school in the United States,

our entire education was shaped by this man more than a century ago.

I didn't know about Abraham Flexner until I was in residency, and like so many others,

like he was incredibly revered and respected.

That's Dr. Uche Blackstock.

Her latest book legacy dives deep into the history of the Flexner report.

This was a report in 1910 commissioned by the American Medical Association and the Carnegie Mellon

Foundation and essentially they commissioned Abraham Flexner to assess all

155 US and Canadian medical schools and to hold those schools against the

criteria of like Western European schools and Johns Hopkins.

It provided recommendations for stricter admission standards, fully equipped labs, and other formalized protocols that made health care

education more similar to Western European medical schools.

But for schools that didn't have the proper funding to make these adjustments, it proved to be disastrous.

At the time there were seven majority black medical schools, many of them in the South that

came about after the Civil War during reconstruction.

By 1905, those medical schools had trained 1500 doctors.

Doctors who would go on to both service their community and mentor future generations of physicians.

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