Part 1 - The Institute Libraries - Institute for Advanced Study

the United States and Canada. He acceptedi and prepared for it by
studying the best of the American schools -- the School of Medicine at
the Hopkins. With the help of Dr. h. Henry Welch and his colleagues, and
of hls brother, Dr. Simon Flexner, then Director a£ Laboratories of the
Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, he developed a serkes of effec-
tive but crude criteria as the basis far his personal investigation of each
of the one hundred fifty-five medical schaols. His report was published
in 1910 as Bulletin No. 4 of the Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of
Teaching. So important was it and is it even today that it was only
recently reproduced. Of all the one hundred forty-seven American schools
about a half-dozen had proper standards of admission and teaching; licens-
ing standards of the States, poor enough'anyay, vere largely honored fn
the breach. The facts were irrefutable; a "pblir revulsionn swept through
the country. Many of the schools employed only the didactic method;.few
had either laboratories or libraries; courses of lectures were short,
and, delivered as they were by busy practicing physicians who used the
schoofs as sources for supplementary income, inadequate. Few requtred
even a high school education for admission; few previous study in medi-
cal and pre-medical science courses, Flexner became nationally lcnm
overnight. He was then sent to survey the same field in Western Europe,
xeporting in Bulletin No. 6 of the Carnegie Foundation for Advancrment
of Teaching. Thereafter he conducted another suxvey in Europe for Mr..
J. D. Rockefeller, Jr, Then in 1913, after eight years of temporary
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ad b c assignments, the farmer schoolteacher from Louisville joined Dr.
Wallace Buttrick, Secretary of the General Education Board, as Assistant
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Secretary, and the Board stself fn 1914.
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