African Americans, women, and the 1910 Flexner report: progressive medical reform and professional exclusion

Between the Civil War and the turn of the twentieth century the American medical profession expanded greatly both in size and in attention paid to scientific knowledge. During this time African Americans, women, and even African American women gained access to medical education through the proliferation of new medical schools. But this period of unprecedented access was in the end short-lived. The Flexner Report of 1910 was the culmination of years of effort on the part of the part of the medical establishment to restrict entrance to the profession. Like much of the contemporary Progressive reform of the time, the Flexner Report found efficiency and standardization to be paramount and in the process left many of the best parts of professional expansion behind-- the diversification of medical students and doctors in terms of sex and race. While most schools were technically coeducational by its publication, within a few years of Flexner, two of the three women's schools were closed and all but two of the seven African American schools were shuttered. The Flexner Report marked the beginnings of a concerted effort to raise the standdards of medical education in the United States and Canada but had far-reaching consequences for women and African Americans students and physicians as well as implications for the care of their future patients.