How a 1910 report erased 35,000 Black doctors and still affects Black healthcare more than a century later
TheGrio...
Abraham Flexner wasn’t a doctor, but the educator’s study about the advancements of medical schools across the country created swift change. Most of it impacted Black medical colleges.
In the United States, there are currently only four historically Black medical schools, four institutions that are responsible for a large number of Black physicians across the country. From Howard University to Meharry Medical College, the Morehouse School of Medicine and Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, these colleges routinely produce Black doctors.
However, those HBMS exist and thrive today solely despite a 1910 report that altered medicine and led to the closure of five Black medical schools across the country. The report, created by educator Abraham Flexner, detailed how medical education was operating in the early 20th century, concluding that there were too many medical schools, leading to the closure of all but two Black colleges and that Black physicians were “dangerous.”
The Flexner Report, which was widely hailed for its outlook on general medical education in the United States despite Flexner not being a medical doctor himself, has also garnered sharp criticism for decades by promoting systemic racism and sexism. Dedicating only two pages of the 380+ page report to Black people, Flexner argued that Black medical students should be trained in “hygiene rather than surgery” and work in ways to keep diseases prevalent in Black communities away from white ones.
“A well-taught negro sanitarian will be immensely useful,” he wrote in the report. “An essentially untrained negro wearing an M.D. degree is dangerous.”
In a later portion of the report, Flexner wrote, “The practice of the Negro doctor will be limited to his own race, which in its turn will be cared for better by good Negro physicians than by poor white ones. But the physical well-being of the Negro is not only of moment to the Negro himself.”
He continued, “Ten million of them live in close contact with sixty million whites. Not only does the Negro himself suffer from hookworm and tuberculosis; he communicates them to his white neighbors, precisely as the ignorant and unfortunate white contaminates him. Self-protection not less than humanity offers weighty counsel in this matter; selfinterest seconds philanthropy. The Negro must be educated not only for his sake, but for ours. He is, as far as the human eye can see, a permanent factor in the nation.”
Limiting the country to only two Black medical schools essentially created the generational shortage of Black doctors that the United States still experiences to this day.
According to a 2006 report published in the National Library of Medicine, the Flexner Report contributed to the demise of medical schools at Shaw University, Louisville National Medical College, the University of West Tennessee College of Physicians and Surgeons and Medico-Chirurgical and Theological College of Christ’s Institution. The only two to survive Flexner’s flawed study were Howard University and Meharry, as he stated that “the upbuilding of Howard and Meharry will profit the nation much more than the inadequate maintenance of a larger number of schools.”
According to C.H. Epps Jr., those two schools were responsible for 85 percent of all African American physicians throughout the first half of the 20th century. Even as those institutions helped prepare thousands of Black doctors across the country, the number of Black doctors in the workforce still remains slim.
Per the most recent study conducted by the Association of American Medical Colleges, only five percent of physicians in the country are Black, compared to 56.2 percent of physicians who identified as White, 17.1 percent who identified as Asian and 5.8 percent who idenified as Hispanic.
The lack of Black doctors and Black medical schools across the country can be traced back to one report and two pages that would wipe out decades of advancement. Effects that still remain more than a century after its publication.