“Abraham and Simon Flexner: Medical Education Reformers in the U.S.A.”
Dialogue by Franklin and Betty Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net
Betty: We begin with Abraham Flexner’s An Autobiography (NYC: Simon & Schuster, 1960) which describes the Flexners of Louisville, Ky., a remarkable family of nine children of immigrant German Jews, the father a peddler in the South.
Frank: We focus on one son, Abraham Flexner, an educator and later foundation executive, not a physician, but whose penetrating 1910 report on medical schools in the U.S. and in Canada helped raise the medical profession from low regard to high esteem. We also mention his brother, Simon Flexner, M.D., a pioneer medical pathologist, and others of the Flexner family.
Betty: Abraham Flexner (1866-1959) was in turn a teacher, researcher, philanthropic foundation executive, and head of an early important “think tank.” He won early attention for his successful private Flexner preparatory school in Louisville, Ky., which prepared indulged and lazy wealthy boys for Ivy League colleges. His first critical book, ca (NYC: Century Co., 1908), prompted a Carnegie foundation executive to ask him in 1906 to examine medical schools in the U.S. and Canada. The 1910 Flexner Report created a revolution; remade medical education in the U.S. and Canada; spotlighted medical quackery; and made science, medicines, and supervised clinical training central in the professional preparation of physicians. He helped professionalize medical education and made medical doctors highly esteemed and well paid top professionals.
Frank: This success led to Abraham Flexner’s work in directing Carnegie, Rockefeller, and other multi-million dollar foundations that tackled difficult educational, social, racial, health, and other problems in the South, then nationally, and finally internationally. He climaxed his career by creating in 1930 the first significant U.S. think tank, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. As its first director he brought from Hitler's Germany Albert Einstein as mathematics professor. Einstein was named Time magazine's "Man of the 20th Century." But first, about his immigrant father, Morris Flexner.
Betty : The first Flexner in the U.S., Morris Flexner (1819-1882), grandson of the chief rabbi of Moravia and Bohemia, was born in Germany to an impoverished family. Because his parents had more children than they could feed, Morris was sent at age 13 to live with an uncle in Strasbourg, Alsace, on the French-German border.
Frank: There he was a teacher for a time, very poor, hoping for a better life in the U.S. He spent 90 days in steerage on a sailing ship to NYC, worked in NYC two years among French-speaking Jews, living from hand-to-mouth.
Betty: Learning of French-speaking Jewish countrymen in New Orleans and hoping to better himself there, he arrived during a yellow fever epidemic, was stricken, and almost died at a charitable hospital run by Catholic nuns. An unknown French-speaking Samaritan fed him, heard him speak of a countryman living in Louisville, Ky., and paid his fare to Louisville.
Frank: He arrived in Louisville on crutches, recovered, and became like his countryman friend a pack peddler, selling goods house to house, store to store. Adept at sharing news and gossip, jovial and likable, he won customers and friends in isolated farm homes, where he was often asked to stay for meals and for the night. He bought a crippled horse for $4, later another horse and a wagon, made a living, stopped frequently at a Jewish merchant's house in Louisville, the Godshaw family, where he saw and was smitten by an immigrant French-speaking Jewish seamstress, Esther Abraham, whom he married.
Betty: Esther Abraham (1834-1905) was born in Germany near the French border. Her father, a dealer in cattle and other items, sent her to school to age 13. When she was 16, an aunt in Paris with a lingerie shop took in Esther and her sister and trained them as seamstresses.
Frank: Uncle Godshaw, the Louisville, Ky., merchant, visited them several times in Paris and sent them tickets for passage to America. After a crossing of the Atlantic that took nine weeks the sisters were met in NYC in Sept. 1855 by a cousin and reached Louisville, where they lived with Uncle Godshaw's family. They successfully made and sold women's Paris fashions.
Betty: Esther, popular socially, took to Morris Flexner. He at age 34 married Esther, age 22, on Sept. 15, 1856.
Frank: In 1857, when Jacob, the oldest of their nine children, was born, Morris Flexner went into business in Lawrenceburg, Ky., taking his family with him. But Civil War raiders made that town unsafe.
Betty: After six years in Lawrenceburg (1857-63), the enlarged Flexner family returned to Louisville. Morris sold hats wholesale on the road, traveling in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, and elsewhere in the South. But the Panic of 1873 ruined him. From 1873 the family lived hand to mouth, dependent on first-born Jacob who, apprenticed to a druggist, had his own drugstore until the Panic of 1893 ruined him.
Frank: The older children and later Abraham earned enough to pay the bills and keep the family together.
Betty: After classes in Louisville High School, from ages 15 to 17, during 1881-83, young Abraham Flexner worked in the private Louisville Library six days a week, 2:30 p.m. to 10 p.m., checking and shelving books, eating a cold supper behind the card catalog, earning $16 a month. Besides charging and shelving books, he dipped into great books and listened to adult conversations about politics, literature, religion, music, and art.
Frank: "The decisive moment of my life,” Abraham later wrote, came in 1884 when I was 17 and had just graduated from high school. His oldest brother Jacob told Abraham: take this $1,000 I saved from my drugstore and go to college in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins University. Jacob had heard of Johns Hopkins University’s high reputation from a Louisville friend, a view confirmed by the medical doctors who came to his drugstore.
Betty: The university’s donor, Johns Hopkins (1795-1873), was a Baltimore Quaker, a bachelor, a merchant, and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's largest stockholder. B&O RR Pres. John Work Garrett (1820-84), knowing that Johns Hopkins sought advice about his will, brought Hopkins together with visiting Mass.-born George Peabody (1795-1869), a former Baltimore merchant, then a London-based banker and the best known philanthropist of his time.
Frank: George Peabody, when asked why and how he decided to give away his millions, told Hopkins: "Like you, I wanted to be rich. I worked hard and succeeded. When age and illness came upon me, I wanted to make the best use of my money. I found trustees who carried out my wishes for U.S. libraries (7), museums (Harvard, Yale, and Salem, Mass.), and a music conservatory (Baltimore) to serve people; and for low-cost housing for London's working poor (from 1862). Seeing the good my institutes did made me happy."
Betty: This contact plus advice from others influenced Johns Hopkins to record his will, leaving some $7 million to found Johns Hopkins University, Medical School, and Hospital.
Frank: Its first President Daniel Coit Gilman (1831-1908) made Johns Hopkins University the first graduate university in the U.S., based on the German university idea that a university creates new knowledge as it educates new generations.
Betty: While Abraham Flexner learned the classics in Johns Hopkins undergraduate program, such doctoral candidates in its graduate schools as Woodrow Wilson were writing the books and experimenting in the labs that would make them future leaders.
Frank: Weak in Latin and Greek, Flexner asked his Greek professor what to do. The professor said: See me each day at 1 PM. I can only give you 5 minutes but I will tell you what to read and check to see what you have learned.
Betty: Concerned because he had only enough money for two years' tuition and board, he asked and was given permission to double his class load. At final exam time, finding that two or more exams came at the same time, he explained his dilemma to Pres. Daniel Coit Gilman, who said: all we require is that you know the subjects. I will arrange to stagger your conflicting exams.
Frank: Flexner later remarked at the informality at Johns Hopkins and at the understanding and help that enabled him to get a bachelor's degree in two years.
Betty: Returning to Louisville in 1886, Abraham taught for two years in the Louisville Male High School he had attended. In late afternoons and evenings he tutored well-to-do boys whose parents anxiously wanted them to get into college.
Frank: A prominent Louisville lawyer whose only son had been expelled from an eastern preparatory school asked Flexner to help get his son into Princeton. Flexner said: if you can find among your friends five of their sons for tutoring at $500 a year each, I will prepare your son for Princeton.
Betty: Thus began "Mr. Flexner's School" which, for 15 years (1890-1905), won high praise locally and nationally. Harvard Pres. Charles W. Eliot (1834-1926) wrote to Flexner: "Boys from your school come to Harvard younger than most and graduate in a shorter time. How do you do it?"
Frank: Abraham Flexner used every strategy on boys who had failed elsewhere: humor, encouragement, emulation, competition. He played able students against indolent ones, built on what each knew, patiently overcame their weaknesses.
Betty: Flexner kept the school small, tuition high, and discipline strict. He drilled, joked, cajoled, used every means to get his boys into Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and elsewhere.
Frank: In the early 1890s prominent Louisville businessman John M. Atherton asked Flexner to tutor his bright niece, Anne Crawford, for entrance to Vassar. Flexner demurred at first but then thought it might be fun to teach a young woman.
Betty: Anne Laziere Crawford was born while her parents visited Ky. but she was raised in Georgia. Her great grandfather, William Harris Crawford (1772-1834), was a U.S. senator from Georgia, U.S. Minister to France, U.S. Secretary of War, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. presidency in 1824. Her grandfather was a Methodist minister and president of Mercer College. Her father was impoverished by the Civil War when she went to live with her Louisville uncle.
Frank: Abraham Flexner did get Anne Crawford into Vassar, where she edited the college literary magazine. She returned to Louisville, taught in "Mr. Flexner's School" two years, and published several stories. They went bicycling together and became engaged in 1896. But because Abraham, eight years older than Anne, was the Flexner family's financial mainstay, they put off marriage for over two years. Anne went to NYC, reviewed Broadway plays for the Louisville Courier-Journal , studied writing at New York University, and began writing plays.
Betty: Anne returned to Louisville, married Abraham Flexner (June 1898), and while Abraham ran his school, she wrote plays, some for leading actress Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865-1932). Anne Flexner's biggest dramatic success was Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, based on the best selling novel, which opened in NYC Sept. 3, 1904, ran for seven seasons, was played by three touring companies, and was presented in England, Australia, China, India and Korea. She wrote other plays but none as successful.
Frank: In 1904 Anne asked Abraham: If you had not married me, what would you have done by now? He answered: Quit teaching and gone to Europe. She said: Then that's what we will do.
Betty: The three Flexners (they had a six year old daughter) first went to Cambridge, Mass., where he studied at Harvard's Graduate School of Education (1905-06). They then sailed for England and the Continent. With letters of introduction, Abraham attended lectures at Oxford and Cambridge universities, visited Rugby and Eton, and studied at the universities of Berlin and Heidelberg.
Frank: In Europe, reflecting on his 16 years of teaching, he wrote his first book, The American College (NY: Century Co., 1908). It criticized trends he had observed at Harvard and other colleges. He criticized:
1-free electives which allowed unwise students foolishly to take only easy courses;
2-large classes which limited student interaction; and
3-overuse of teaching assistants, busy and harried as graduate students themselves and unprepared to teach effectively.
Betty: One reader of his critical book was Henry Smith Pritchett (1857-1939), president of the newly formed Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. They met several times and Pritchett asked Flexner: Would you consider doing a study of U.S. medical schools? Taken aback, Flexner said: You are confusing me with my medical doctor brother Simon Flexner. No, said Pritchett, I know Dr. Simon Flexner and I know that the American Medical Association has a committee examining medical schools. But medical doctors can't or won't criticize their colleagues. I want you because you are an educator and a critic. You can call the shots as you see them.
Frank: Henry S. Pritchett, graduate of a college which his father had started in Missouri, earned the Ph.D. degree in science at the University of Munich (1894); was an astronomer at the U.S. Naval Observatory; then taught astronomy at Washington University, St. Louis, Mo. (1883-97). He headed the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey (1897-1900) and became president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1900-06). There he suggested to steel magnet Andrew Carnegie that he establish the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which Pritchett headed for 24 years (1906-30). Pritchett's list of things he hoped to accomplish at the Carnegie Foundation included:
1-a national pension plan for teachers and professors, today's Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association(TIAA);
2-a national standard for high school graduation (the Carnegie unit); and
3-studies to uncover weaknesses in and to professionalize nationally schools of medicine, law, engineering, and other professions.
Betty: Reading the history of medical education in the U.S.A., Flexner found that in all there had been 457 medical schools in the U.S. and Canada, some still-born, most short lived, 155 functioning in 1907, all private, most concerned mainly to make money for their owners. Nearly all accepted any applicant who could pay tuition and relied for teaching staff on local physicians who taught part time for extra money. There were no state medical licensing boards. Few medical schools were connected to a hospital or had clinics, research facilities, or updated equipment. Medical students were still little more than apprentices.
Frank: Flexner soon saw that Johns Hopkins had the best of the medical schools, largely led by its first famous medical faculty: Drs. William Henry Welch (1850-1934), pathology; Howard Atwood Kelly (1858-1943), gynecology and obstetrics; William Stewart Halsted (1852-1922), surgery; and William Osler (1849-1919), medicine.
Betty: Johns Hopkins Medical School was picked as a model because its entrance requirements were high and its medical faculty were highly trained, mostly in European universities. Medical students examined and studied patients in hospital wards under the supervision of experienced physicians. Students discussed symptoms, findings, and lab tests results with experienced physicians; and consulted their superiors about the best course of treatment. Patients benefited and medical students became competent.
Frank: Flexner looked for the following in the 155 medical schools he visited in the U.S. and Canada:
1-entrance requirements and how rigidly they were followed.
2-faculty size and training; how many faculty were full time (few) and part time (most).
3-finance: what endowment, what fees, what financial stability?
4-laboratories and equipment: how many, what kind, what quality, how much used, and how frequently updated?
5-library: professionally staffed; adequately budgeted? Number and quality of books and journals?
6-medical faculty and student access to nearby hospitals and the amount and kind of student supervision at bedsides by experienced physicians.
Betty: Pritchett and Flexner let medical school heads know when and how Flexner planned to evaluate their schools. Flexner talked to medical school heads and faculty (when present), toured the facilities, returned to Louisville, drafted his report (shared with Pritchett), and sent this draft report to the medical school heads for any corrections. His final draft report, he said, would be shared with local newspapers and journals before publication.
Frank: Flexner had to deal with subterfuges, as when doors in one medical school, marked "Anatomy," "Physiology," and "Pathology," were locked. No keys nor janitor could be found. When the medical school dean left Flexner at the railway station, he deliberately missed his train, went back to the school at night, found and bribed the janitor to open the locked doors, and found the rooms to be unequipped classrooms, and so stated in his report.
Betty: Pritchett and Flexner were threatened with lawsuits and Flexner received threatening letters. In a year and a half Flexner finished inspecting the 155 medical schools and completed his report, Medical Education in the United States and Canada (NYC: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Bulletin No. 4, 1910).
Frank: Of the consequences of his report, Flexner wrote: "...such a rattling of dead bones has never been heard in this country before or since. Schools collapsed to the right and left, usually without a murmur. A number of them pooled their resources. The seven schools of [Louisville] were reduced to one. The 15 schools in Chicago were consolidated to three." Here are a few excerpts from Bulletin No. 4:
--Birmingham Medical College [Ala.]: "A stock company largely given over to gunshot and other wounds. The dispensary service is as yet unorganized."
--California Medical College: "Entrance requirements nominal. No dispensary. No access to the County Dispensary. The school is a disgrace."
--University of Louisville: "Entrance requirements: less than a high-school education."
--Georgia College of Eclectic Medicine & Surgery: "A building [of] filthy conditions. Its anatomy room, containing a single cadaver, is indescribably foul." (Bulletin 4, p. 87).
Betty: Flexner's 1910 medical education report emerged at the height of large scale philanthropic foundation growth. Civil War devastation had inspired George Peabody (previously mentioned as having influenced Johns Hopkins) to found the pioneer $2 million Peabody Education Fund, 1867-1914, to aid white and black public schools in the 11 former Confederate States plus West Virginia (because of its poverty).
Frank: The PEF inspired other northern philanthropists to aid southern black education: the John F. Slater Fund (1882-1937), Julius Rosenwald Fund (1917-48), the Anna T. Jeanes Fund (1907-37), and others.
Betty: Four Conferences on Education in the South during 1889-1902 led to the Southern Education Board (1901-14), which led to the John D. Rockefeller-funded General Education Board (1902-39), which soon employed Abraham Flexner.
Frank: Scottish-born steel magnate Andrew Carnegie's (1835-1919) 1889 essay, "The Gospel of Wealth," urged the rich to use their wealth to correct social ills and to .advance the public good. His Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was a small part of his $350 million gifts founding public libraries and to solve American problems. Larger funds were started by John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and Jr., devout Baptists who regularly tithed. Carnegie, the Rockefellers, and other giants of industry organized large philanthropic funds, giving unheard of millions to help correct social ills.
Betty: Flexner's 1910 medical school report impressed John D. Rockefeller, Sr.'s philanthropic advisor Frederick T. Gates (1853-1929), a former Baptist minister. Gates once told Rockefeller, Sr. : Your wealth is piling up and will bury you. It will ruin your children and their children unless you use it for vast public good.
Frank: Gates and the Rockefellers favored funds that aided medicine and the conquest of disease. This purpose was dramatic and brought public approval, despite critics who said that the Rockefeller foundations were intended to offset bad publicity about Rockefeller as a monopolist robber baron.
Betty: Gates enlisted Abraham Flexner to work for Rockefeller’s General Education Board (1913-28, 15 years), funneling millions to remake U.S. medical schools. Rockefeller, Sr's biographer Ron Chernow (Titan, the Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., NY: Random House, 1998, p. 493) wrote: "by the time Flexner left the GEB in 1928, it had distributed more than $78 million to the scientific approach to medical education...[creating] nothing less than a revolution. In its thirty-year existence, the GEB dispensed $130 million, equal to more than $1 billion today [c.1998]."
Frank: Flexner climaxed his career by creating the nation's first significant think tank. In 1930 he was approached by Newark, N.J., merchant Louis Bamberger (1855-1944) and his sister, Mrs. Caroline Bamberger Fuld, seeking advice on a foundation they hoped to establish.
Betty: Flexner explained that German universities had led the world in creating new knowledge. But since Germany's defeat in World War I, U.S. scholars no longer flocked to German universities. The U.S. needed an Institute for Advanced Study, an intellectual retreat, a place without students or courses where scholars, unhindered, could discover new knowledge.
Frank: The donors asked what such an institute would cost. Flexner said $5 million. The donors agreed. Asked to be its first director, Flexner demurred. His wife Anne insisted that having suggested the idea he had to help get it started.
Betty: The Institute for Advanced Study was located in Princeton, N.J., near to but independent of Princeton University. Flexner sought to first fill a mathematics professorship which did not require labs or buildings, only blackboards and chalk. He sought out Albert Einstein (1879-1955) who was lecturing at U.S. universities, having fled Germany when Hitler’s Nazis burned his books.
Frank: Einstein liked the freedom Flexner offered, moved to Princeton, N.J. and held the chair of mathematics at the Institute of Advanced Studies until his death in 1955.
Betty: Opening in 1933, the Institute for Advanced Study became a haven for scores of other European scholars fleeing the Nazis, including Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885-1962). Other Institute scholars included John von Neumann (1903-57), who built an early giant computer there; physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-67), who led the Los Alamos, N.M., scientists in developing the atom bomb (he was the Institute's director in the 1950s). The Institute for Advanced Study has some 200 visiting U.S. and foreign scholars for up to two years, and 23 faculty in four schools: mathematics, natural science, social science, and historical studies.
Frank: Abraham Flexner's wife died in 1955. In 1957 he moved to suburban Washington, D.C., to be near his married daughter. He died Sept. 21, 1959, at age 93. He often quoted French chemist Louis Pasteur (1822-95): "Chance favors the prepared mind." He ended his 1940 autobiography I Remember with these words by Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881): "I burn that I may be of use."
Betty: We Parkers corresponded with Abraham Flexner soon after publication of his book, Funds and Foundations (NYC: Harper, 1952). We were then doing graduate work at George Peabody College for Teachers, Nashville (renamed Peabody College of Vanderbilt University from July 1, 1979).
Frank: Flexner's Funds and Foundations book had a chapter on the Peabody Education Fund which he described as the first pioneer U.S. multimillion dollar foundation. I wrote to Flexner for his views on my proposed dissertation topic, “George Peabody, Founder of Modern Philanthropy,” which he encouraged.
Betty: We then read George Peabody-related papers in library depositories in Massachusetts, NYC, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and in London, England. After Flexner died we published three articles about him in: Proceedings of the Southwestern Philosophy of Education Society , X and XI , 1959-60, pp. 16-27; Journal of Medical Education , 36, 6, June 1961, pp. 709-714; and History of Education Quarterly, 2, 4, Dec. 1962, pp. 199-209, each documented with footnotes.
Frank: Later in 1985, referring to our articles about her father, his daughter, Mrs. Jean Flexner Lewinson, wrote us. Thus, our long-time interest in the Flexner family.
Betty: Time now to describe Simon Flexner, fifth-born son of the nine Flexner children. His contributions as a pioneer medical pathologist is well told in his son’s book: James Thomas Flexner, An American Saga: The Story of Helen Thomas and Simon Flexner (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984).
Frank: Young Simon Flexner was small, weak, shy, and mischievous. "School," he later wrote of his youth, "did not [then] interest me."
Betty: Simon Flexner barely finished grade school in Louisville, never attended high school or college; instead held a succession of poorly paid dead-end jobs. When he was age 10 the Panic of 1873 bankrupted his father, plunged the struggling family into deeper poverty, and required those of the nine children who could work to do so. At age 16 he contracted typhoid fever, almost died, and suddenly saw himself in a new light. Oldest brother Jacob got him an apprenticeship in Vincent Davis's drugstore in Louisville.
Frank: Druggist Vincent Davis, a devout Christian, encouraged Simon's night attendance at the Louisville College of Pharmacy. Simon, earlier the family dunce, not only completed the pharmacy course but also won a gold medal in his course work. His son and biographer later wrote: "The ugly duckling had proven a swan" (James Thomas Flexner, p. 106).
Betty: Simon became a pharmacist in oldest brother Jacob's drugstore, open 24 hours a day. Jake subscribed to pharmaceutical and medical journals, had a good memory and liked to expound, making the drugstore a clearinghouse of medical information, and a mecca for local physicians.
Frank: Simon acquired a microscope, learned much from other microscope enthusiasts among the visiting doctors, and was soon doing slide analysis for them.
Betty: Yearning to become a pathologist and despite being tied to the drugstore because of the Flexner family's financial needs, he did attend night courses at the nearby Medical Institute of the University of Louisville and earned the M.D. degree in 1889.
Frank: Meanwhile, Abraham had graduated from Johns Hopkins University, had taught in the Louisville Male High School, and was successful in the Flexner college prep school. Knowing Simon's determination to become a pathologist, Abraham encouraged him to apply for a Johns Hopkins Medical School fellowship. Simon did apply but failed to get the fellowship. Seeing Simon's disappointment, Abraham said to him in 1890: From my prep school earnings I will give you enough money to study pathology at Johns Hopkins Medical School for one year.
Betty: Simon went to Johns Hopkins and studied under pathologist William Henry Welch, a mentor largely responsible for Simon's becoming one of the great medical discoverers of his time.
Frank: Thirty years later (June 1, 1920), Simon wrote Abraham in gratitude for "the great debt I owe you. To have sent me to the Hopkins and Dr. Welch in 1890 has meant more for me than anyone except myself can know. That you should have possessed the insight that Dr. Welch was the master in pathology is almost miraculous. How deeply I feel my unredeemable debt to you." (Abraham Flexner, An Autobiography, p. 60).
Betty: Simon so impressed Dr. Welch and others at Hopkins that he was offered a fellowship the following year. Simon became Welch's assistant (1892), published studies in pathology, gained valuable experience fighting an outbreak of spinal meningitis in western Maryland (1893), visited Europe to study pathology at Strasbourg and at Prague, and was associated with Johns Hopkins Medical School as pathologist during 1890-98.
Frank: Studying diseases in the Philippines (1899), Simon Flexner discovered a widespread strain of the dysentery bacillus. He was pathology professor, University of Penn. (1899-1903), during which time (1901) he headed the U.S. Government commission investigating a bubonic plague outbreak in San Francisco.
Betty: In 1903 Simon joined Dr. Welch in the newly organized Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, NYC. In a 1905 NYC outbreak of spinal meningitis he found a serum that reduced mortality by 50 percent. In a 1907 epidemic of polio he identified the infectious virus and laid the basis of protective polio vaccines 50 years later.
Frank: Simon wrote over 200 pathology and bacteriology reports (1890-1909), edited the Journal of Experimental Medicine (19 years), was a Lt. Col. in the Army Medical Corps during World War I, building up its medical laboratories abroad.
Betty: Simon directed all the Rockefeller Institute branches from 1924 to his retirement in 1935. He helped organized the Peking Union Medical College, China; was appointed Eastman Professor at Oxford University (1937-38); wrote with his son James Thomas Flexner, William Henry Welch and the Heroic Age of American Medicine (NYC: Viking Press, 1941), wrote in all over 400 medical and pathological reports and other books .
Frank: Simon Flexner received many honors and died in NYC at age 83, leaving his wife, Helen, and two sons. His wife Helen, essential in Simon’s career, was from a distinguished family.
Betty: Helen Thomas Flexner was born Aug. 14, 1871 (d. April 1956), descendant of Welsh Puritans who settled in Maryland, 1650s, and became prominent Baltimore Quakers.
Frank: Helen’s older sister, Martha Carey Thomas (1857-1935), earned a European university Ph.D. degree (Zurich, 1882), helped found Bryn Mawr College for Women (Penn., 1884), and was its dean and president (1894-1922).
Betty: Their father was a Johns Hopkins University trustee. Helen Thomas also attended Bryn Mawr (1889), traveled abroad, and met Simon Flexner several times: when he did post-doctoral study under pathologist Dr. Welch at Johns Hopkins Medical School, and again when he was pathology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, near Bryn Mawr.
Frank: Simon Flexner was awed by Helen Thomas’s family culture and thought she was too much above him. She, too, thinking the gulf between them unbridgeable, rejected his first proposal, then had a change of heart.
Betty: Despite doubts, they were married in 1903, when he was first connected with the Rockefeller Institute, NYC. She was 32, he was 40. It was a wonderful marriage of 43 years, this blending of the daughter of a famous well-to-do and well-connected Baltimore Quaker family and the fifth son of a failed immigrant German Jewish peddler.
Frank: One of Simon and Helen's two sons was a mathematician and UN official; the second, James Thomas Flexner (1908-2003), was a prolific author, most famous for his four-volume biography of George Washington, published in one volume for the U.S. bicentennial and successfully produced as a television miniseries. Abraham and Simon were the only Flexners who married out of their parents' faith. Surviving Simon by 10 years, Helen basked in his many honors.
Betty: Of the other Flexner children: Jacob Flexner (1857-1934), the druggist, become a successful medical doctor. His daughter, Jennie Flexner started and headed the New York Public Library's Readers' Advisor's Office. Bernard Flexner (1865-1945), a prominent lawyer, was a juvenile court reformer of note; he endowed at Bryn Mawr a Mary Flexner lectureship and at Vanderbilt University an Abraham Flexner fellowship; was an ardent Zionist, never married and lived in NYC with sister Mary. Mary Flexner, already mentioned, attended Bryn Mawr supported by Abraham in whose Flexner School she later taught.
Frank: It is heartwarming to conclude that the Flexner story illustrates how high some children of immigrants were able rise against all obstacles in nineteenth century U.S.A. Abraham and Simon Flexner made outstanding contributions. Some of the children and grandchildren of the original nine U.S.-born Flexners. have also achieved renown in arts, letters, and related fields.
Betty: It was our good fortune to have had brief contact with one member of this family, Abraham Flexner. Our admiration for him prompted us to find out more about the family background and to share their story. Thank you for reading it.
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