Chapter 4 offers a rereading of a well-known example of medical standardization, Abraham Flexner’s 1910 report for the Carnegie Foundation on the state of medical education. Often read as an instrument of medical professionalization, the report is here set in the context of Flexner’s body of work as an educational reformer who saw efficiency as a critical vehicle for the injection of egalitarianism. Yet, Flexner’s application of efficiency to medical schools did not yield egalitarianism. Instead, the Flexner Report is illustrative of the twisting, complex path that efficiency took toward capitalism. Though at the time, these issues received their fullest airing in the context of the so-called poor boy, whom critics claim would always be on the outside of Flexner’s reforms, the chapter narrates this process also with consideration of the disenfranchising impact of the Flexner Report on Black medical students.
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