Abraham Flexner and the development of the Yale School of Medicine

Abraham Flexner first toured the Yale University School of Medicine in preparation for his report of 1910, but it was just the beginning of his relationship with the school. While his review of Yale in his report was generally favorable, he mentioned several shortfalls that needed to be improved to make the school acceptable. Throughout the next twenty-five years, Flexner worked with Deans George Blumer and Milton C. Winternitz to improve the school's finances, infrastructure, and quality of education through his work with the Carnegie Foundation and General Education Board Flexner has been given great accolades for his work on medical education for the country, but little mention is made of him at Yale, even though he was one of the most influential figures in the development of Yale in the last century.     

Abraham Flexner and medical education

The Flexner Report had its roots in the recognition in the mid-19th century that medical knowledge is not something fixed but something that grows and evolves. This new view of medical knowledge led to a recasting of the goal of medical education as that of instilling the proper techniques of acquiring and evaluating information rather than merely inculcating facts through rote memorization. Abraham Flexner, a brilliant educator, had the background to understand and popularize the meaning of this new view of education, and he took the unprecedented step of relating the developments in medical education to the ideas of John Dewey and the progressive education movement. Although the Flexner Report is typically viewed as a historical document--due to an understandable tendency to refer only to the second half of the report, where Flexner provides his famous critiques of the medical schools that existed at the time--this article argues that the Flexner Report is actually a living educational document of as much significance to medical educators today as in Flexner's time. The article analyzes Flexner's discussion of medical education and shows that his message--the importance of academic excellence, professional leadership, proper financial support, and service and altruism--is timeless, as applicable to the proper education of physicians today and tomorrow as in the past.     

History of the Department of Pediatrics Yale University School of Medicine.

The history of pediatrics at the Yale University School of Medicine can be divided into eight historical eras. The "Paleohistorical Era" included colonial figures such as Governor John Winthrop and Hezekiah Beardsley who wrote about children''s disease in colonial times. Eli Ives, Professor of the Diseases of Children at Yale Medical School gave the first systematic pediatric course in America in the first half of the nineteenth century. During the second era, from 1830-1920, the New Haven Hospital was opened. An affiliation between Yale University and the New Haven Hospital led to the formal establishment of clinical departments including pediatrics in the early 20th century. Six eras coinciding with successive pediatric chairman have led the department to its present respected position in American pediatrics. The department''s 75th anniversary in 1996 is an occasion to recognize many of the department''s accomplishments and leaders over the years. It is also a time to reaffirm the mission of the department: to the health needs of the children of Connecticut and beyond, to the advancement of scientific knowledge of infants and children and their diseases, and to the training and educational of the pediatric clinicians, educators and investigators of the future.     

The early years of coeducation at the Yale University School of Medicine.

The Yale School of Medicine began accepting women as candidates for the degree of medicine in the fall of 1916. This decision was consistent with the trend in medical education at the time. While Yale was not the first prestigious Eastern medical school to admit women, joining Johns Hopkins (1893) and the University of Pennsylvania (1914), it was not one of the last. Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons admitted women a year later, but Harvard Medical School held out until 1945. The years 1916--1920 saw the number of women enrolled in medical school almost double. Yale''s decision to admit women seems to have been made with little resistance from the faculty. The final decision was made through the encouragement and financial help of Henry Farnam, a professor of economics at Yale, who agreed to pay for the women''s bathrooms. His daughter, Louise, was in the first class of women. At graduation she was awarded the highest scholastic honors, the Campbell Gold Prize. From Yale she travelled to the Yale-sponsored medical school in Changsha, China, where she became the first female faculty member, a position she held for twelve years. The impressions of Ella Clay Wakeman Calhoun, the only woman to graduate in the second class of women, are presented here. Since 1916 the Yale School of Medicine has undergone extensive physical and philosophical changes, developments in which women have participated.