NASHVILLE HISTORY CORNER

WHY WAS ABRAHAM FLEXNER IMPORTANTTO VANDERBILT?

BY RIDLEY WILLS II

In 1909, Abraham Flexner traveled across the county making a survey of medical schools, which was published by the Carnegie Foundation the following year.

Of the medical schools in Tennessee he wrote: “The State of Tennessee protects at this date more low-grade medical schools than any other Southern state…. Practically all that can be asked of Tennessee is that it should do the best possible under the circumstances. This it did not do. The six white schools value their separate survival beyond all other considerations….Those who deal with medical education in Tennessee are therefore making the worst, not the best, of the limited possibilities.” He called names to prove his point. Flexner went on to add: “If our analysis is correct, the institution to which the responsibility for medical education in Tennessee should just now be left is Vanderbilt University; for it is the only institution in position at this juncture to deal with the subject effectively.”

Four years later, Andrew Carnegie gave the Vanderbilt Medical School $1 million, but that proved inadequate.

In 1919, on the recommendations of Dr. Wallace Buttrick, secretary of the General Education Board, and Abraham Flexner, the GEB announced a gift of $4 million to Vanderbilt to be increased in later years by more than $10 million. The GEB made the gift

because in the South, Flexner said, “there is not one really respectable school south of the Ohio River.”

He argued that because of the strategic importance of Nashville, the standards that had been maintained by Vanderbilt throughout its history, especially in the academic department, and, above all, because of the courageous leadership of Chancellor Kirkland, Vanderbilt was worthy of this extraordinarily generous gift.

The General Education and Carnegie gifts made possible the construction of a new Vanderbilt Hospital with laboratories and lecture rooms in one large building, and the reorganization of the university’s Medical School. The cost of constructing this building and a nursing home was $13 million. The Medical School’s student body was set at 200, carefully selected from many times that number of applicants.

Flexner, by then secretary of the General Education Board; Buttrick, then president of the GEB; and Chancellor Kirkland were convinced that the new Vanderbilt Medical School was one of the half dozen great medical schools in the country. John Finley, in an editorial in The New York Times, wrote of, “the courage and liberal policies of the university and their approval of its chancellor. It was one of the greatest demonstrations ever made in America in support of sound learning and in endorsement of constructive educational policies.”