Title
The History of African American Medical Schools and the Flexner Report
Files
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Identifier
JonesL_04_20140501-Final_Clip11
Publication Date
5-1-2014
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
I’m sorry. What’s the name of that one?
Lovell Jones, PhD
Meharry.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
I don’t know that one.
Lovell Jones, PhD
That’s in Nashville.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Oh, okay.
Lovell Jones, PhD
It’s one of the surviving black medical schools. If you don’t know the history of that, is that at the turn of the century there were ten black medical schools in the country. There were eighteen women medical schools in the country. None of the women medical schools survived the Flexner Report, and the Flexner Report was done by two brothers, one a physician, the other a hatchet man. (laughs) And it was a way of the Medical Society to control the number of physicians in the U.S. and who would be a physician. So they went around the country—quote, unquote—looking at the quality of the training of physicians, and then they came back with the recommendation that no medical school should exist that’s not affiliated with a university.
Well, most of the women medical schools weren’t, because [unclear]. And only one of the medical schools was—well, actually only one was affiliated, of the ten, with a university, and that was Howard University’s medical school. And Meharry happened to be quasi affiliated with Fisk, which is across the street. So those were the only two that survived.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Wow.
Lovell Jones, PhD
So if you look at that—and I tell people to think about this in terms of health disparities, because people haven’t made that link, at least as far as I know. So you go from ten to two. The majority of institutions are not taking African Americans as medical students, so you’ve now reduced the flow of physicians by 80 percent to a community that really needs physicians. And then you redirect women to be nurses, because the majority of medical schools aren’t going to take women either.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Or maybe not even nurses.
Lovell Jones, PhD
Right. So you set the pattern for years and years and decades, because by 1918, there were no women medical schools in the country, and there were just Meharry and Howard.
Recommended Citation
Jones, Lovell Ph.D. and Rosolowski, Tacey A. Ph.D., "The History of African American Medical Schools and the Flexner Report" (2014). Race, Gender, & Work @ The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center: Triumphs of Houston’s Leading Hospital. 20.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_racegenderwork/20
