Health care reform, circa 1910

“At North Carolina Medical College [educational researcher Abraham] Flexner quoted a faculty member: ‘It is idle to talk of real laboratory work for students so ignorant and clumsy. Many of them, gotten through advertising, would make better farmers.”

— From “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History” by John M. Barry (2004)

The Flexner Report, published in 1910 by the Carnegie Foundation, brought about epochal reforms in medical education in the U.S. and Canada — and led to the end of N.C. Medical College in Charlotte, which was judged “thoroughly wretched.” In 1914 college officials, unwilling or unable to spend the money needed for compliance with Carnegie standards, closed shop and enrolled their students at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond.

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