Stuff You Should Know - How the Flexner Report Changed Medicine

Episode Date: February 19, 2026

The Flexner Report shook up medicine in the United States when it was released in 1910 and it's never been the same since. For better or worse.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Gerger Binks is here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know about the Flexner Report. That's right. This was a suggestion by my wife. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah, Emily, of course, everyone knows. if they listen to the show as an organic gardener and an herbalist. She said, has long asked me to do one on the Flexner report, which is a report written in 1910 that did a lot of things. Basically kind of revamped how medicine worked in the United States moving forward in medical school in particular.

Right. But Emily was interested because another thing it did, a byproduct was it basically completely squashed what we would now call alternative medicine, homeopathy, basically saying it has zero value, and we're not doing that anymore. It sure did, Biff. Yeah, and it was also racist and sexist. It was definitely of its time. This is a document produced in 1910 for sure.

Yeah. And it definitely stinks of eugenics and all that. Yeah. So it's one of those weird things where, like, you can see it from all sides because it did a lot of good, and it also maybe didn't do some good in certain areas. Yeah, for sure. And there's not many people who are like, no, the Flexner Report sucks. It was all bad because if you enjoy being treated successfully for cancer, you can pretty much thank the Flexner Report for that. But at the same time, yeah, if you believe that there are

alternative therapies that are as good or better than medications, then, yeah, you probably don't like that part of the Flexner report. But I think on the whole, it was a good thing. There seems to be now among, you know, thinking people who don't just Wade and Wallow and Dogma saying, like, we need a new Flexner report for the 21st century because it's basically run its course. And now, again, it's become dogma and we need to do something about that. Right. I think that's a great setup. And maybe we should paint a little bit of a picture about what medicine and medical school look like in the United States pre-Flexner report. It was bad. I guess quickly we should say that Europe was doing it right before we were.

In France especially, they had some pretty top-notch medical schools where they embrace real science and were practicing medicine on people like as practice in colleges and stuff like that. But in the United States, that was around 1850. In the U.S. in 1850, they had 52 medical schools. this is what 50, 60 years before the Flexner report. And medicine was not, you know, to be a doctor was not some prestigious thing. Medicine was a trade. If you were associated with the university at all as a medical school, it was a two-year program. The curricula was very, very broad.

They were super underfunded. Even at places like Harvard, they had to pay for their own teaching supplies. And those were the good ones that were attached to universities. Yeah, I mean, there were plenty of diploma mills. They were a lot of proprietary medical schools where it was just some people got together and created a for-profit school where they would teach you how to become a doctor, but they were not doing a very good job of it. And your admission requirement was the ability to pay the tuition fees, essentially. Yeah, for sure. You might have like redundant classes that literally went over the same things. You might not have your hands on a scalpel ever. You might not have an exam ever. You may not see patients. You might not have any contact with another human being

at that medical school. It'd be kind of like if you went to go skydive and in the class before you go skydive, they just talk about how hard the ground can be if you hit it and then they take you up in a plane and push you out. It's similar to something like that. That's good.

Thanks. I like it. But then everybody, the Civil War came around in the 1860s, and there was wartime doctoring happening. And after the Civil War, people came out of that saying, we're in trouble everybody. Like, the doctoring wasn't so great in this war. And we need to fix this. Well, what I interpreted is that they went out and got real world experience and realized, like, the stuff they learned at school was not preparing them for actual medicine. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think it was a little bit of both. I think the person who had their leg chopped off unnecessarily complained. And I think the doctor who did the chopping might have complained as well. Right. They didn't teach me that patients complain in medical school. Yeah. So yes, regardless by the 1860s, like it was quite clear that American medicine was lacking tremendously. And that the main reason for that was that the doctors who were practicing medicine had virtually no. actual training in medicine.

There's lectures, textbooks, that's basically it. So there was a part of the progressive era. This actually, this push to create a movement to make medicine in America better. And by focusing on the medical school education, that came around in about the 1870s. It was led by Harvard. Yeah. But really, Johns Hopkins University was the one that really hopped on. it. Yeah, for sure. Like Harvard got the ball rolling for a couple of decades. And by the time

Johns Hopkins opened in 1893, they became kind of the standard for the American model moving forward, which, as we'll see, was based on the German model. Right. You had to have a, first of all, you had to have a college degree just to get in. And that was previously not necessarily the case. Secondly, they had full-time faculty. They were medical scientists. So they weren't doctors on the side as well. They were just fully employed to teach. And they had a four year, like a full four year course of study where it was hands on and a lot of laboratory work. Yeah.

And yes, where they were actually working with patients or assisting other actual doctors in working with patients. Like it wasn't just like sit there and listen to this lecture. Yeah. That was, and that essentially that Johns Hopkins model is what. what became the model for American Medical School. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of talk at parties if you stop and listen about whether this would have happened on its own or not. Yeah. And for the most part, it seems that, yes, this progressive era movement would have gotten there eventually.

Yeah, probably. Just because it was a good idea. Yeah. The Flexner report helped it happen on a dime because not only did it show to everybody else this is the way to do it. It also said, this is very expensive, and here's how we need to get the money for it, and did get the money for it. Like, that's how it was implemented. Yeah, for sure. The American Medical Association was founded in 1847.

And one of the reasons, and, you know, again, this is stuff that I learned from sort of Emily's urgings. One of the reasons the American Medical Association was founded to begin with was like on a mission to sort. squash homeopathy. It says so in its charter. And when the AMA was founded, they discouraged any association or communication with those kinds of doctors and had a code of ethics. It was a clause in there known as a consultation clause that said, if you even talk to a quote unquote non-regular practitioner, then you're going to lose your license to practice medicine. They carved out exemptions for Massachusetts and New York because it was homeopathy was really, really, really popular at the time among the elite wealthy Americans, like the major politicians, the corporate leaders. I think it was

Rockefeller, I think it was Rockefeller that was under the care of a homeopathic doctor for like 50 years. Wow. So they carved out exceptions for those two states for a while until they were able, you know, all those people died off basically and they were able to completely squash it. Right. Rockefeller died, so I guess the homeopathy didn't work. Well, he lived another like 48 years after being told he didn't have long to live, I think. Oh, wow. It's a homeopathy works. Case closed. So, yes, I think that you've really put your finger on it. The AMA became the arbiter of what qualifies as medicine in the United States.

Thanks to this Flexner report. It basically strengthened all of its position. and yes, they were the driving force behind this initially. They went to the Carnegie Foundation and said, hey, you got a lot of money. Why don't you help us figure out how to change American medical education in the exact way we want it? And we'll help you figure out who to do that with. We like the Johns Hopkins model.

We basically want a report that says the Johns Hopkins model is great. Let's get an outsider in here. And that is how Abraham Flexner enters this story. Yeah. And, you know, this is not to say that he was like cooking the books or anything like that. No. This was all the sham. But that was just sort of, the AMA was definitely after that.

Well, one of the reasons he was selected is he was already a person and educator who espoused exactly this kind of stuff, just not necessarily as it applied to medical education. He just wasn't exposed to medical education at the time. But he was an educational philosopher and theorists. and he was fully on board with that kind of thinking. Yeah, I mean, he wrote a book. I guess we should say he did go to Johns Hopkins, but not for medicine. I think he studied classic civilizations. And he was a teacher in his hometown in Louisville, Kentucky.

Eventually, he was a private school headmaster that he founded the school. And after earning a degree in psychology from Harvard, he wrote a book called the American College, which was sort of the Flexner Report of the University. system as a whole. And this guy named Henry Pritchett, who was the president of the Carnegie Foundation at the time, was like, yeah, like Josh of Clark of the future will say, this is our guy. Because did you see the way he came at the regular universities? Like, wait till he finds out what's happening in medical schools. Exactly. And then one of the other reasons that he was such a great candidate, because he was an outsider and a non-physician, is that they were quite aware that there was going to be a lot of blowback, that there were going to be a lot of, of bruised egos and stepped on toes and that somebody outside of the profession would be less likely to suffer, say, like a professional injury or being ostracized for the rest of their career. Yeah, Flexner was like, I don't care what you think of me, doctors. That's right. So he started out by researching the European models, the American models.

Like I said, he was really impressed with the German model. Yeah. And in fact, a couple of years after the American and Canadian, as we'll see, Flexner Report, he published a European version, which critiqued, well, Europe, basically everybody but Germany. He was very uncritical of the German system. And we also need to point out some of the bad things, he said. There were several anti-Semitic passages in the European version of the Flexner report because he was so enamored of how the Germans did their medicineing. Yeah, this was, yeah, that German model also inspired the guy who founded Johns Hopkins Medical School, William Welch. And that was essentially, so essentially the Flexner report said the Johns Hopkins model is what we want.

Johns Hopkins said the German model is what we want. And the Germans said, yeah. Yeah, da. Yeah. No, that's Russian. Das boot. That's German. Nice.

What else? Um, the Heimlich maneuver. Yeah. That's it? Bratworth? Cider. Okay. Yeah, all that stuff.

Octoberfest, but with a K. Should we take a break? Yeah. All right. You're going to think, think, did you say, yeah? Yeah. We're going to think of some more German words or Deutsche words. And we're going to be back with more on what Plexner said right after this.

Next Monday, our Twitter. The 2026 IHeart Podcast Awards are happening live at South by Southwest. This is the biggest night in podcasting. We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry. And the winner is... Creativity, knowledge, and passion will all be on full display. Thank you so much.

IHeart Radio. Thank you to all the other nominees. You guys are awesome. Watch live next Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific, free at veeps. or the Veeps app. Hi, this is Joe Winterstein, host of the Spirit Daughter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life.

And I just sat down with a mini driver. The Irish traveler said when I was 16, you're going to have a terrible time with men. Actor, storyteller, and unapologetic, Aquarian, visionary. Aquarius is all about freedom-loving and different perspectives. and I find a lot of people with strong placements in Aquarius are misunderstood. A son and Venus and Aquarius in her seventh house spark her unconventional approach to partnership. He really has taught me to embrace people sleeping in different rooms, on different houses and different places,

but just an embracing of the isness of it all. If you're navigating your own transformation or just want a chartside view into how a leading artist integrates astrology, creativity, and real life, This episode is a must listen. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast starting on February 24th on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast. My latest episode is with Hillary Duff, singer, actress, and multi-platinum artist. Hillary opens up about complicated family dynamics, motherhood, and releasing our first record in over 10 years. We talk about what it's taken to grow up in the entertainment industry and stay grounded.

through every chapter. It's a raw and honest conversation about identity, evolution, and building a life that truly matters. You desire in family like this picture, and that's not reality a lot of the time it's for people. My sister and I don't speak. It's definitely a very painful part of my life, and I hope it's not forever, but it's for right now. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Chetty on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Chuck, I could only come up with one more, and it was strudel, but it's the best one. Yeah. Oh, wait. Frankenstein? Yeah. That's it. Do you see that new Frankenstein movie?

The Bride? No, no, no. The, uh, what's his name? New Frankenstein movie. I don't, I don't know. The Rock? Who? No. The director, Guillermo del Toros. Oh, no. What did you think of it? That was pretty good. I got a little bored, but it was, everyone said it was really great. I think I was distracted.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is redoing the bride in like a really strange, like, out there kind of fashion that looks interesting. Yeah, I saw that. I thought it seemed super interesting, and I love mags, so I'm down. Okay, well, that's fine. I'll allow it. So back to the Flexner Report. He started that research in 1908. I think the thing came out in 1910, like we said.

But he went around all over the place. He went to 155 medical schools, 148 of which were in the United States. Seven were in Canada. Spends a couple of days there with his nose turned up. And he did this for about 18 months. Yeah, just to be clear here, this guy was not phoning this in. He definitely took the assignment and did it to, like he did it. Like all of those 100.

55 medical schools in the U.S. and Canada, that was every medical school in the U.S. and Canada, including ones that taught alternative medicine and black medical schools in the United States. So, like, he definitely went through the paces. It wasn't just like a, yeah, let's look at Johns Hopkins and here's my report. Yeah, for sure. And you mentioned the black medical schools because they come up pretty front and center here in a minute. Yeah. But Johns Hopkins was the like the gold standard. So that was his comparison point for all of them. He looked at everything. He looked at how they financed their school. He looked at how big the classrooms were, how many teachers they had per student,

like admissions, what it took to get in, what they were actually teaching, laboratory stuff, facilities, kind of everything. And what he came out with was one of three determinations in the end for each school. The school is good. You can stay, you can keep your doors open. Your school is not so great, but you show promise. So maybe if you have some more funding and you change these things, you can be okay. And then, I'm sorry, please close your doors forever.

Yeah, there was a lot of them that he categorized as hopelessly deficient. A lot. Most, in fact. Yeah. And it wasn't just like him being a snooty butthead. Like the, as we said, like the medical schools in the United States were in a lot of case is hopelessly deficient. And that's a problem when you're producing doctors, you know. So he did make a pretty good case that there were a lot. They were hopelessly deficient.

But the deficient ones, they actually had different rankings. For example, Iowa State University's medical school, he basically said they know what they're wanting to do, but the hospital associated with it is too small. And your clinical faculty, the people who are supposed to be doing research and teaching medicine to the students, they all have their own private practices because they have to support themselves. So if you gave this group enough funding, they could create a top-notch medical school in the Johns Hopkins model. That was kind of like that deficient category, the varying degrees of how much money you would need and whether you're headed in the right direction. Yeah, for sure. The way he wrote in what was called Carnegie Foundation

Bulletin number four or medical education in the United States and Canada, a.k.a. Flexner report was that very muckraking style. It's not the kind of report you would. People wouldn't write it this way today because he did get a little, it seems like he enjoyed sort of the put downs and coming up with new ways of saying how bad a school was. So people would write it that way today, unfortunately. Well, you're probably right. One of them, he said, apparently the inexcusable degree of ignorance begins just where the ability to pay fees leaves off. Oh, right.

Yeah. And so he was basically taking them to task over low admission requirements, if any. But he didn't say low admission requirements. He also used the word reeks, which you don't usually see in academic studies. Yeah. He said the osteopathic schools in the United States, there are eight of them that they reeks. that they reek of commercialism, that they attract students with a mass of hysterical exaggerations

that confidently appeals to the crude boys or disappointed men and women whom it successfully exploits. Yeah. We should say osteopathy is an accepted form of medicine in the United States now, but a lot of people still view it as a pseudoscientific alternative medicine. Yeah, I mean, he had a sight set on them on chiropractors, on all kinds of things that a lot of people put a lot of great value in today.

So he was off based on some stuff for sure. But again, this was 1910. So of the underfunded medical schools, and this was a problem, too, this is actually one of the things that befell black medical schools, as we'll see in a minute. If you were underfunded, that was it. Sorry. No amount of funding is going to bring you up. Well, maybe some amount of funding is going to bring you up to speed. but we need that money to bring other medical schools that are closer up because we can bring more of them up to snuff or we can bring fewer up to snuff and basically get the ones that are the least funded.

His whole premise was just close those poorly funded ones because they're just not going to be able to do this. Yeah. And, you know, he was probably on to something there because there was a glut of bad schools. And his quote was, the curse of medical education is the excessive number of schools. The situation can improve only as weaker and superfluous schools are extinguished. Right. Like I said, it was Canada and the U.S. Canada fared much better.

Our northern friends up there of the seven Canadian medical schools, he only recommended one for closure. So one seventh of them. That's right. The 148 medical schools in the United States, more than half of them he recommended closing. And I think it ended up being more than that even, right? Yeah, he actually recommended reducing the full number of schools in the U.S. and Canada from 155 down to 31. Yeah. That's four-fifths.

So, yeah, I mean, like, he was basically a hatchet man. They brought him in to basically get rid of competing, poorly funded, poorly run medical schools. He said, if you're a proprietary medical school, it doesn't matter what you're doing, you're closed. He saw med school as a public trust that it should be publicly funded, ergo they should be associated or attached to public universities, and that the reason that doctors were being produced was to help society along, that you should not have a board or stockholders to whom you were really kind of beholden to so they would affect your decision making. No, you needed to be beholden to science. Right. And ideally to patients, although he didn't put much. emphasis on that part. Yeah, and we'll talk about that at the end. So every single proprietary

school was immediately on the list, basically, from the jump. Like, if you weren't affiliated with the university, you had no hope for surviving this. All the holistic or what we call alternative medical systems were completely shut down. Five of the seven black medical schools were recommended for closure. I think Howard University and D.C. and Mahary Medical College, right here in Georgia, he thought might be salvageable. But there are a couple of chapters in there. Chapter 14, specifically, the medical education of the Negro was the title of that chapter, where he shows a real disdain for black medical schools.

He said they were wasting money, small sums of money annually, that undisciplined men whose lack of real training is covered up by imposing MD degrees. And he basically ended up saying, like, close most of these. and my suggestion is just to make black medical schools to train black doctors, to treat black patients only, and they should really just concentrate on hygiene. Yeah, they should focus on public health in order to keep black people from spreading disease to white people.

That was essentially his take on the purpose for the existence of black doctors. Out of 346 pages in the initial version of the report, two, Chapter 14 was two pages, two pages long. And that is shocking in and of itself. But the Flexner report was essentially the first document about medicine and medical school that even acknowledged the existence of black medical schools. Up to this point, they were totally invisible, completely ignored. So the fact, in a really silver lining to the cloud way of looking at this, the fact that Howard University and Meherry Medical

College in Georgia made the cut. Yeah. Um, was really substantial. Like that was a, that was sadly a really big positive for black medical schools, unfortunately. Yeah, for sure. Uh, you know, I mentioned sexism too. The AMA and the Carnegie Foundation were also not too hot on the idea of the three, um, women's medical college, colleges even existing. Uh, and Flexner himself, um, basically came out and said, I don't think women can withstand the mental rigors of being a doctor. He never met Elizabeth Blackwell.

Yeah. No kidding. And he literally said, you know, women make better patients than doctors. This is the 1910s. Yeah, it's not like 1810. So, yeah, so this was, I mean, I guess on the other way of approaching this, too,

so we've talked about everything that he was giving the hatchet to you, he had a version of what made an ideal medical education. And again, it was based on the German model, which the Johns Hopkins model was based on. And he essentially said, so you need to have rigorous instruction. You need to have rigorous admissions requirements. And you have to enforce them, too. And in doing so, he basically said you're going to weed out candidates who aren't, they don't have, they can't make the cut for this new kind of doctor.

So that meant you had to have money to even get started because this new model was so much more expensive than the old model. Like tuition, I think, needed to increase three to four times just to start to meet the funding for this. So you just out of the gate had to have money to even try to apply to medical school. And then the academic requirements meant that even if you had money, if you didn't have what it took to, like, like really dedicate yourself to learning this stuff, you were going to fail out too. So in that sense, it took doctors from being just ordinary tradespeople and said, these people are responsible for keeping the population of the United States healthy and we're making sure that they are up to the task in return. They're rich now. That's right. And, you know, part of it was as medical school was

expensive was because, or ended up being more expensive is because they needed better facilities, they needed better equipment. I know we already mentioned that teachers were working part-time as doctors just because they had to make a living. But one of his big key recommendations was you have to have a full-time faculty that is just doing biomedical research. Like they're not doctoring on the side. And in order to come up with this kind of money, it was expensive. The idea of medical philanthropy repeat really, really took off because, you know, Johns Hopkins was one thing. But if you wanted to have more than one John's Hopkins-like model out there, you had to lay out this roadmap of basically, you know, starting in 1910 and over the next like few decades and continuing today, these huge

foundations were created. And also local groups just donating money to, to make sure the Flexner report was enacted. Like the Rockefeller Foundation, they gave hundreds of millions of dollars to get these programs going across the country. Yeah, and it worked. But again, it took hundreds of millions of dollars in, I think, 1910 money, too. Should we take a break? Let's take a break. All right.

We'll be right back with the closing act of the Flexner Report. Next Monday, our 2026 IHeart Podcast Awards are happening live at South by Southwest. Since the biggest night in podcasting. We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry. And the winner is... Creativity, knowledge, and passion will all be on full display. Thank you so much.

IHeart Radio. Thank you to all the other nominees. You guys are awesome. Watch live next Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific, free at Veeps.com or the Veeps app. Hi, this is Joe Wintersstein, host of the Spirit Daughter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life.

And I just sat down with a mini-driver. The Irish traveler said, I was 16, you're going to have a terrible time with men. Actor, storyteller, and unapologetic Aquarian visionary. Aquarius is all about freedom-loving and different perspectives, and I find a lot of people with strong placements in Aquarius are misunderstood. A son and Venus and Aquarius in her seventh house spark her unconventional approach to partnership. He really has taught me to embrace people sleeping in different rooms, on different houses, in different places, but just an embracing of the isness of it all.

If you're navigating your own transformation or just want to chart-side view into how a leading artist integrates astrology, creativity, and real life, this episode is a must listen. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast, starting on February 24th, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. Hey, I'm Jay Chetty, host of the On Purpose podcast. My latest episode is with Hillary Duff, singer, actress and multi-platinum artist.

Hillary opens up about complicated family dynamics, motherhood, and releasing our first record in over 10 years. We talk about what it's taken to grow up in the entertainment industry and stay grounded through every chapter. It's a raw and honest conversation about identity, evolution, and building a life that truly matters. You desire in family like this picture, and that's not reality a lot of the time it's for people.

My sister and I don't speak. It's definitely a very painful part of my life. And I hope it's not forever, but it's for right now. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So we're back. One of the results we talked about was all these schools shutting down. I think more within 10 years, I'm sorry, within five years of the reports release. More than 50 of the medical schools in the United States shut down.

And 20 years on, only 76 of the original 148 in the United States remained. Like you said, five of the seven black medical schools, 80% of the alternative medicine programs were shut down. And the handful of schools that had admitted women were either shut down or not admitting women anymore for a while. Right. So, like, this was a huge impact on the way that doctors were created. in the United States and, again, the profession of doctoring in the first place. And it happened very quickly, as you just mentioned. And there are a lot of positives to it, but there are a lot of criticisms to the outcomes, too.

One of the big ones is the impact that the Flexner had on producing black doctors in the United States. I saw an estimate that had all seven of the black medical schools stayed open and been funded so that they could follow this model. another 30,000 Black doctors would have been produced in the United States between 1910 and 2012, I think, which is a big deal

because apparently right now, 2% of American doctors are black, but the percentage of the black population in the American population overall is 13%. So they're grossly underrepresented, which is another problem in and of itself because studies show that black patients are likelier to follow the orders and instructions of black doctors than they are of doctors

of other races. It's just a question of comfort. Yeah, for sure. And you could also make an argument that that gave rise to things like the Tuskegee experiments and other like awful experiments carried out by white doctors on black patients that led to this cycle of mistrust of the, you know, the medical profession as a whole. Yeah, there was a whole, like part of this, this emphasis on science. And because Flexner was not a physician, he really ignored the idea of the physician as a healer. The physician is somebody who was meant to see their patients as human. And instead, because of this focus on rationalism over humanism, the patient became essentially just a walking bag of medical issues that needed to be diagnosed and treated. They weren't a person. That

stuff didn't matter. The point of the doctor was to treat their illnesses and make them better. not to be their friend. And in doing that, like the medical profession lost a lot of, I guess, connection with the rest of us where, you know, doctors are kind of looked at as looking at the rest of us is not fully human. And that doesn't really jibe and feel good, you know, when you're a patient. Yeah, for sure. I think I can't find it. It's not in front of me now.

But I sent you one study from a few years ago where I think the long and short of it was they were surveying people that, how happy they were with like the end of care, um, care, uh, for relatives. And I think, uh,

only 40% of the people were satisfied with like how they're, uh, the end of the lives of their relatives went. Yeah. And a lot of that had to do with pain management. And that sort of ties back to what you were saying about, um, just sort of the rigorous,

you know, uh, eyeballs on a microscope and, and, and, and, like, eyeballs on a human.

Um, you know, It's all sort of tied in together, I think. Yeah, and the other way that that manifested itself was a huge emphasis on separating academic physicians from practicing physicians so that the academics could just focus on research. And then they emphasized the research that the academics were producing. Like, that's the most important thing. You clinicians listen to the research doctors and what they're finding, and then you can go apply it to your practice. And so they were like, well, you've taken these people away from patients.

and they're just using like this the scientific mentality, and there's no humanism to it. And the critics say that was one of the ways that this whole idea of science losing its humanity or medicine losing part of its humanity or soul came about. Yeah, for sure. You know, I know I've already mentioned a little bit about eliminating sort of all kinds of alternative medicines and that homeopathy was homeopathy. What do you say? I've heard both.

Okay. I was saying both at the same time. Was very popular at the time. I mean, there are people that think that they were doing pretty well with homeopathy and curing disease with natural remedies. Other people will say, no, you've got your tinfoil hat on, and that's not the case. They just didn't know real science at the time. So there's a lot of raging debate online about that kind of stuff. But another point of this all is that psychiatric medicine lost a lot of. of, I guess, curricular elements that were very beneficial at the time for mental health treatment. Like they were making a lot of strides at the time with things like meditation and like how nutrition, like food can alter like a person's or lifestyle can alter a person's mental health. And that was all just sort of flushed down the toilet because of this. And the neurochemical model came out of mental illness. And the same people that were arguing for homeopathy,

basically said, you know, what the Flexner Report really did was, among other things, was let us down the path of people like the Rockefeller Foundation, creating big pharma, essentially, and getting people on endless amounts of medicine that just don't heal you and they're just never ending and make big pharma bigger. Yeah, psychiatric medicine is a good example of that. They just took the neurochemical model of mental illness and that that was that. I mean, I think a lot of that stuff has come back now. Yeah, for sure. It's just not super funded and you're not going to find any, like, huge, you know, medical schools that, that tout their homeopathy departments or anything like that.

But I think there's underground movements for all that stuff. Like, hey, meditation can help your mental health. And maybe these herbs can make you feel better or this honey that you rub on your cut is better than bactean or whatever. It really is. If you see a good psychiatrist, especially probably a younger one these days, one of the first things they're going to ask you is how are you sleeping? Are you exercising what your diet like? Yeah, totally. And then they'll start to go into meds, but like they're going to say, like, you need to really pay attention to these three things. And if you still need meds, it'll still drastically reduce the kind or amount of meds you'll probably need. Right. If you're taking care of yourself in the other ways. Exactly. So that has definitely come back in some. psychiatry, and that's a really good example of what a lot of people point to. The Flexner Report suppressed that for 100 years. It derailed black doctors. It derailed women doctors. It derailed

alternative medicines. It even took the stuff that was part of the medical establishment and twisted it around, and it took a full century for things to start to even come back. And that, again, is a really big criticism of the whole thing. But overall, you can point to a lot of stuff, a lot of lives that were saved, a lot of lives that were improved, a lot of lifespans that were extended because of this Johns Hopkins German model that the Flexner report essentially with the AMA got the Rockefeller Foundation to fund and create this new model for America. Yeah, this is one of those rare episodes where there's truly like two ways to look at it.

I mean, he definitely threw the baby out with the bathwater in a lot of cases. Oh, well put. But you could also argue that, like, it was such a mess that, like, something drastic had to happen. Mm-hmm. Or else, you know, who knows how many more decades it would have taken. I mean, I definitely agree with you that, like, it would have happened at some point. I doubt if we'd still be sitting here today had the Flexner report not been written and, like, I'm sitting here with, like, a leech on my forehead. Right, right.

I have typhus. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I agree with you. Chuck, this is a good one. Thank you, Emily, for it. Thanks, Josh. You're welcome. That was a great Emily. Nice seeing you in San Francisco, buddy.

Yeah, it was great to see you too. I don't know why I'm talking like you, but I am. If you want to know more about the Flexion Report, go out and read it. It's 346 pages of muckrake and gold. And since I just wrapped up this episode as if it were from 2010, I think it's Chuck time for listener mail. That's right. This is from Kyle. Hey guys, I'm sure you've heard this over the years. Maybe you receive snarky emails from people saying, what do you mean? I should know this.

Oh, yeah, I like this email. Thanks for picking it. In a way, it makes it seem like they interpret it as stuff you should already know, but I always took the approach that a quintessential SYSK episode sheds light on something that a person should know in order to give voice to situations, regions, historical events, things like that. something we should know today to help learn and grow. And Kyle, that's, of course, always been the case. Yeah, it's stuff that we think you should know, which we want to share with you.

It is interesting to learn how the sun or the jackhammer works I found. I see what you're doing there, Kyle. I found that the Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan episode was exactly what I think of as a great stuff you should know episode. My only knowledge of Helen Keller was what I had learned from the late 90s in aughts media and pop culture. So thank you for showing me how amazing both of them were as people, activist, advocates, and his friends,

the lives of Keller and Sullivan is something everyone should know. Thank you. That is from Kyle. Thank you right back, Kyle. That was a world-class email. Don't you think, Chuck? Yes, Kyle. That was wonderful. Yeah. So if you want to knock it out of the park with an email like Kyle did, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. Heart Radio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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