by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
What the mainstream media is hiding
In 1910, the infamous “Flexner Report” brought Western medicine into line—and in the process, crippled it. What today’s medical students learn to admire as a historic triumph of science over quackery actually meant that therapeutic diversity was lost, and the healthcare system was realigned with a capital-intensive, pharmaceutical-heavy paradigm that reduces patients to biological machines in need of repair.
He owned 90 percent of all the oil refineries in his country. He was America’s first billionaire (1). And throughout his life, he was treated by homeopaths: John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) . Yet this very magnate used his fortune to eradicate from the American healthcare system the very homeopathy to which he had entrusted his own long life. Inconceivable? Welcome to the founding history of modern medicine. It is not flawless. And less edifying than its official origin myth would have us believe. But it’s more instructive. It’s the story of a meticulously orchestrated assassination. In the name of science—or what passes for it.
The name looming over this story is another: Abraham Flexner (1866–1959), an unemployed schoolteacher from Louisville without a single day of medical training. (2) His “Report” from 1910 is still regarded today as the birth certificate of scientific medicine. It is indeed that. But it is not only that.
The starting point: A colorful marketplace in need of cleanup
To understand the Flexner Report, one must realize who it was intended to eliminate. Around 1900, American medicine was not the wasteland of bloodletting and quackery that it is often portrayed as in hindsight. It was a fairground: loud, chaotic, at times surprisingly thriving—and full of schools vying with one another for patients. Alongside “conventional” medicine, there were up to 15,000 homeopaths, 1,000 to 2,500 osteopaths, and up to 2,000 “naturopaths” : alternative practitioners who relied on the body’s self-healing powers rather than merely suppressing symptoms. In addition, there were 1,000 to 2,000 “botanical practitioners” (botanical practitioners): doctors and healers who worked primarily or exclusively with medicinal plants. They followed the folk-medicine and lay-medicine tradition of the Thomsonian movement:
a self-help initiative founded in the early 19th century by the herbalist and botanist Samuel Thomson, which was decidedly anti-elitist and opposed to the trained medical profession. Thomson sold “family licenses” to his healing system so that every household could treat itself with a fixed repertoire of herbal remedies without having to consult a doctor.
It was from this milieu that the so-called “eclectics” (eclectic physicians) later emerged. The name comes from the Greek eklegein (“to select”)—and sums up the approach of the approximately 10,000 licensed “eclectic” physicians of that time: They sought to select the best elements from all available healing methods rather than submitting to a single doctrine. They were, in the best sense of the term, cherry-pickers of medicine. They combined conventional treatments with herbal medicine and homeopathic remedies. Their medical colleges explicitly taught this combination. In practice, many doctors who were “homeopathic,” actually used this eclectic, mixed approach—homeopathy as the primary method, supplemented by orthodox medicine and herbal remedies. They firmly rejected the “heroic” conventional medicine prevalent at the time—massive bloodletting, mercury and arsenic treatments.
And what was the status of homeopathy back then? A fringe phenomenon for the uneducated? Not at all. With 12,000 to 15,000 licensed physicians, it was the medicine of the American elite. There were over 100 homeopathic hospitals, around 1,000 homeopathic pharmacies, and 22 homeopathic medical schools—including those at Boston University, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Iowa. (3) Around 1900, it was by far the strongest, most respected, and best-organized alternative healing modality in the U.S. Among its avowed supporters were the novelist Henry James; his older brother, the great philosopher and psychologist William James; the novelists Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe; the poets Emily Dickinson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, two of the most significant poets in American literary history; as well as industrialists such as George Westinghouse, Henry J. Heinz, George Eastman, and Joseph Wharton. (4) A list that reads like a 19th-century Who’s Who of America.
As the medical historian William Rothstein noted, the early American homeopaths were “through and through well-educated and cultured physicians”; they displayed a level of “erudition” rarely found in the mainstream medical journals of the time. (5) Paul Starr, whose bestseller Social Transformation of American Medicine won the Pulitzer Prize, provided the apt conclusion: Because homeopathy was “both philosophical and experimental,” “many people found it more rather than less scientific than orthodox medicine.” (6)
Getting Rid of Unwelcome Competition
It is precisely this point that the later narrative of victory glosses over: Homeopathy was not opposed because it was unscientific. It was opposed because it was competition. Its founder, Samuel Hahnemann, had sharply criticized the heroic bloodletting, mercury, and arsenic treatments of conventional medicine
—criticism whose validity even conservative medical historians acknowledge today. (7) At the same time, he prescribed low doses and, in most cases, a single remedy. For pharmacists, who made their money on the volume and number of prescribed substances, this posed an economic threat. Twenty-three moves in fifteen years: that’s how often the authorities forced Hahnemann to relocate, spurred on by the pharmacists (8). To heal or to sell—this conflict is not a modern invention. It has simply grown older.
In America, this conflict gave rise to an organization that is today regarded as the epitome of serious medicine: the American Medical Association, the professional association representing some 80,000 “Regulars,” practitioners of conventional medicine. It was founded in 1847—two years after the American Institute of Homeopathy—to curb the latter’s growth, as its own charter states. (9) Its sharpest weapon was the infamous “consultation clause”: Any conventional physician who consulted even one homeopath lost their AMA membership—and, in some states, their medical license as well. A doctor in Connecticut was expelled for consulting a homeopath: his own wife. A New York doctor was kicked out for buying lactose. Lactose. From the wrong pharmacy—a homeopathic one. (9) The New York Times sarcastically summed up the AMA’s stance at the time: If a patient could only be saved by consulting a homeopath, then he would simply have to die. (10)
This is roughly the tone that booms out at the unbiased reader from nearly every line of the Flexner Report.
“Independent” Expert Opinion with a Predetermined Outcome
The choreography was a masterstroke—not of science, but of camouflage. The AMA had long since begun evaluating “sectarian” medical colleges through its Council on Medical Education—but it could hardly act as judge in its own case. So a workaround was arranged: through a foundation sympathetic to its cause. Henry Pritchett, head of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (11), met with Arthur Bevan of the AMA Council. They agreed: The Carnegie Foundation would “sponsor” the study so that the AMA “could achieve its goals without appearing to finance the report.” (12)
Abraham Flexner was chosen as the executive director; he—what a coincidence—had been working for the Carnegie Foundation since 1908. His most important qualification: none. He had no medical training, no medical background, and—this was his real advantage—he had not publicly aligned himself with any of the competing schools. Thus, he was considered “impartial” . (13) It was deliberately overlooked that his brother, Simon Flexner, was the first director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research—a declared advocate of scientific medicine and an opponent of all “sectarian” practices, including homeopathy. (14)
This supposed independence was a transparent charade. Independent of what, exactly? Of the AMA, whose leadership he consulted with on a regular basis? Of its secretary, Nathan Colwell, with whom he toured the colleges? Of his brother, who headed the Rockefeller Institute? (15) That would be about as independent as a referee who takes the field wearing the jersey of one of the two teams. Flexner maintained no comparable contacts with representatives of homeopathy; the American Institute of Homeopathy sought a meeting before Flexner’s survey began—it never took place. (16)
“Ammunition in Your Hands”
Six months before publication, Pritchett wrote a letter that, in a criminal case, would be filed as a smoking gun. He wrote to Bevan of the AMA:
“Throughout this entire process of reviewing the medical schools, we have been closely associated with you and your committee. When our report is published, it will be ammunition in your hands. It is therefore desirable, in the meantime, to maintain a stance that does not suggest any direct connection between our two efforts.” (17)
Ammo. In your hands. A later AMA publication openly boasted that Colwell had “provided far more guidance on this famous survey than is generally known.” (18) Some historians put it bluntly: The AMA “fabricated” this report. (19)
And the effort expended on this pseudoscientific survey, upon which a century of medical history is based? Fly-by visits to 155 colleges and 12 graduate schools over 16 months. Mathematically, that’s less than one day per school, including travel time. (20) Anyone who has ever figured out how a foreign institution works in a single morning, please speak up.
In terms of content, the report prescribed the model of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine: rigorously laboratory-based, modeled on the German university system, with full-time professors instead of practicing physicians in teaching roles. (21) Flexner declared the “sectarian” approaches—homeopathy, eclecticism, chiropractic, naturopathy—to be obsolete. Regarding homeopathy, he wrote the oft-quoted sentence: “The waning vitality of homeopathic schools is a striking demonstration of the incompatibility of science and dogma.” (22) He called chiropractors “unscrupulous quacks.” He denounced eclectics as “drug-mad” (drug mad). (23)
What merits does the report have?
Anyone who sees the Flexner Report as nothing but a capital offense is taking the easy way out—and is mistaken. American medicine did indeed have a real problem, and the report actually solved parts of it.
The market for medical colleges was riddled with profit-driven “diploma mills” that churned out doctors on an assembly-line basis—without laboratories, without clinical facilities, and with virtually no entrance exams. Anchoring medical education at universities, grounding it in mandatory scientific principles, and linking it to teaching hospitals—all of this certainly brought about progress. In his critical 100-year assessment, Thomas Duffy explicitly notes: The success of the reorganized training was “awe-inspiring in the breadth and depth of understanding and discoveries.” (24) And even the AAMC, which removed Flexner’s name from its honorary award in 2020, acknowledges that the report
“recommended valuable changes in medical education, many of which continue to have a positive impact today.” (25)
Putting medicine on a scientific footing, taking bacteriology seriously, standardizing curricula: all of this was long overdue. The problem with the Flexner Report is not that it called for scientific rigor. The problem is what it swept away under that banner. And whose pockets it ultimately lined.
A Paper Wrecking Ball
For the report did not remain a mere piece of paper. It became a wrecking ball—and the devastation can be quantified.
Of the original 155 schools, 89 closed within 15 years. (26) The 22 homeopathic medical colleges that still existed in 1900 had shrunk to two by 1923; by 1950, not a single school taught homeopathy anymore. (27)
Flexner also dealt the “eclectics” a fatal blow—even though they, unlike the homeopathic purists, had integrated many conventional treatments into their practice. Nevertheless, they suffered the same sweeping crackdown: in the wake of the Flexner Report, their schools were closed just like the homeopathic and naturopathic ones; their last college, in Cincinnati, was forced to shut down in 1939. Eclectic Medicine vanished from the U.S. without a trace—almost without a trace, and without anyone writing an obituary for it.
The report’s racism and sexism had a particularly devastating effect. Flexner recommended closing all medical colleges for female students—shortly thereafter, only one remained. (28) Flexner was certain that women were ill-equipped to handle the intellectual demands of the medical profession; they were better suited to be patients than doctors. (29)
Of the seven medical colleges that trained Black physicians, five closed. (30) A 2020 study in JAMA Network Open estimated the cost of this: Had the closed historically Black schools remained open, they would have produced an estimated 35,315 additional Black physicians by 2019 —for 2019 alone, that would have meant a 29 percent increase in Black medical graduates. (31) How does the present look in light of this figure? In 2018, only 5 percent of U.S. doctors were Black, even though Black people made up 13.4 percent of the population. (32) A century later, an entire demographic group is still paying the price for a report that a man with no expertise in the field—a puppet on the strings of powerful institutions—cobbled together in 16 months.
Meanwhile, the AAMC itself admits: The Flexner Report “exacerbated systemic racism in medicine.” (33)
Whoever provided the money dictated the course of medicine
A report alone does not close a school.
What gave the Flexner paper its irresistible power was the money behind it—and this is where John D. Rockefeller enters the scene, in a grotesque role that no screenwriter would have dared to write.
Rockefeller lived to be 97 years old. For the last fifty years of his life, he was treated by homeopaths. (34) When he suffered from exhaustion and depression in the late 1880s, it was his homeopathic doctor and golf partner, Hamilton Fisk Biggar, who got him back on his feet—with homeopathic remedies and more vacation time. Rockefeller lived another 48 years after that. (35) In 1916, he wrote: “I am a homeopath. I wish that homeopaths be treated fairly, courteously, and generously.” (36) And in 1919, when donating $45 million to the General Education Board, he instructed: “Homeopathic instruction should not be excluded; it should be provided for, just as allopathic instruction is.” (37)
Nothing came of this wish. Not a single homeopathic institution received even a cent from Rockefeller’s foundations throughout the entire 20th century—despite philanthropic donations ranging from 500 million to 1 billion dollars to medical institutions. (38) How could this have happened?
This was ensured by a man whom Rockefeller himself had appointed: Frederick T. Gates, his Baptist advisor. Gates, who was not a medical doctor himself, despised homeopathy—he described Hahnemann as “a little less than a lunatic” (“a little less than a lunatic”). And so he consistently directed the foundation’s funds to the accounts of orthodox institutions, while concealing his own bias from Rockefeller. (39) Furthermore, he personally selected key personnel for Rockefeller’s foundations and institutions who shared his strong aversion to homeopathy. Known for giving his foundations free rein, Rockefeller either did not notice this or allowed it to happen. His biographer Ron Chernow sums up Gates’ “true goal”: to deal the homeopaths “a fatal blow”—to close their schools, expel them from medical societies, and strip them of their clinical privileges, “in order to clear the field for scientific medicine.” (40)
And this brings us full circle back to Abraham Flexner. In 1912, shortly after the report’s publication, he was appointed to Rockefeller’s General Education Board, initially as “Assistant Secretary” and, beginning in 1914, as a board member. There, he worked until 1928 to implement the demands of his own report. (41) Between 1910 and 1930, at least 180 million dollars were allocated for this purpose; there is no evidence that any homeopathic college or hospital ever received any of these funds. (42) The author of an expert report was allowed to become the enforcer of his own recommendations, with the checkbook of the world’s richest man in his pocket. This model is commonly known as “carrot and stick.” The stick was the report. And the carrot? Rockefeller’s money. (43)
Medical education shifted to the universities, which monopolized it.
Only those who studied there were granted a medical license—taught by full-time professors who conducted research in the laboratory instead of practicing medicine. Ironically, Sir William Osler—highly esteemed by Flexner and one of the four founding professors of Johns Hopkins University—vehemently opposed this system (44): It would produce a generation of “clinical prigs”—doctors, who were cut off from the realities of their patients’ lives. In a 1911 letter to the president of Johns Hopkins, Osler wrote that he could “imagine nothing more subversive to the highest ideal of the clinical school than to entrust our young men to a group of teachers who are, ex officio, removed from the conditions under which these young men will live” .
Osler delivered a scathing judgment on Flexner’s professional competence: He had a “very feeble grasp of medicine” (very feeble grasp of medicine); the report contained so many errors that he could not decide whether “unfairness or ignorance” prevailed.
So what? Flexner’s “miraculous ability to attract money,” as TIME Magazine bitingly noted, easily made up for hair-raising quality deficiencies. His talent for raising funds was legendary. George Eastman, founder of the Eastman Kodak Company, praised Flexner as “the best salesman I’ve ever seen.”
Medical historian Thomas P. Duffy summarized what his report lacked as follows: While Flexner is rightly credited with bringing more science into medical education, it is precisely because Flexner was not a physician—and his supporters were not clinicians—that his report contains a flaw that continues to distort medical education to this day. A “hyper-rational system” created “an imbalance between the art and the science of medicine.” By banishing the practitioner and leaving education to salaried researchers, Flexner divided the profession and contributed to its loss of public standing; many people today view doctors as more interested in the science of medicine than in the patients themselves—one reason why millions are turning to alternative care. Is it any different today?
In 2011, Duffy drew a bitter conclusion: the voices of the few prominent critics—most notably William Osler and the neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing—had been “silenced by the irresistible allure of large sums of money.” (45) The transition from a healing-oriented to an economic logic could hardly be more clearly articulated.
This transition simultaneously made medicine more presumptuous, intolerant, and dogmatic. As naturopathy pioneer Benedict Lust accused it of doing, it behaved like a “national state church” that felt empowered to “eradicate dissent” through “harsh and vindictive measures.”
(46)
Parts of the medical press also reacted sharply. Journals such as the Medical Sentinel, American Medical Compound, Therapeutic Gazette, and Hospital Bulletin called the report “hasty,” “full of errors,” “a monumental piece of insolence,” and “unfair to small and worthy schools.” (47)
But eventually, they, too, fell silent. Going with the flow of the new, Flexnerized mainstream became more and more a matter of survival for the medical trade press. (48)
Bought, courted, married: The love story of the AMA and Big Pharma
The third, often overlooked strand is financial in nature and linked in particular to one name: George H. Simmons. The AMA secretary-general and JAMA editor—who, in an ironic twist of history, had himself practiced as a homeopath for ten years (49)—invented a business model that tied the AMA and the pharmaceutical industry together for decades. From then on, every advertisement in JAMA was intended to imply the AMA’s “approval” of the advertised drug—which justified higher ad rates. (50) No one demanded proof that the drug worked or, at the very least, did no harm. The result: JAMA’s advertising revenue multiplied, as did the AMA’s membership. (51)
A professional association became an institution whose revenue was structurally dependent on the pharmaceutical industry. Simmons himself warned his successor that doing business with drug manufacturers was “much like Faust trying to strike a deal with Mephistopheles.” (52) You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to recognize a diagnosis in this metaphor. Simmons himself made it.
What remained: Oil-funded palliative medicine
If one brings these three strands together—the ideologically one-sided report, the billion in funding as a tool for enforcement, and the pharmaceutical-funded professional association—the result is the foundation of what we call “Western medicine.” It is a foundation with astonishing achievements: antibiotics, surgery, emergency medicine, and bacteriology. None of this should be downplayed.
But this consolidation came at a price: diversity. Medicine became more homogeneous, wealthier, whiter, more male-dominated—and more one-sided in its thinking. It defined “scientific” not as “empirically open,” but as “laboratory-centered and patentable.” Approaches that focused on nutrition, lifestyle, self-healing powers, and prevention were not refuted. They were de-funded. A distinction that historians of science tend to blur. Anyone who finds homeopathy’s criticism of bloodletting and mercury thoroughly justified must acknowledge: At times, the “regulars” preached dogma, while the “sectarians” demanded empiricism. (53)
In short: The entire foundation of modern Western medicine—the General Education Board, the Rockefeller Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the billions that made Flexner’s recommendations enforceable in the first place—was financed by Standard Oil’s wealth.
Literally “oil-based,” then: The money that shut down the diploma mills, dried up the homeopathic colleges, and funded the full-time professorships came from petroleum refineries.
The popular narrative of “Rockefeller, who murdered naturopathy” is nevertheless too simplistic, too monocausal, too tailored to a single villain. (54) The truth is both more banal and more disturbing: No sinister master plan was required. Rather, all it took was a genuine need for reform, a one-sided expert report, a covert collusion between a foundation and a professional association, and an incompetent, narrow-minded advisor. And a great, great deal of money.
No conspiracy was necessary. A purchase agreement was enough.
And herein lies the real, uncomfortable lesson of the Flexner Report—one that extends far beyond homeopathy. When those who fund a science also determine which of its questions may even be asked, the result is not neutral science, but one that bends to the interests of its funders. It becomes a brothel, with the prostitutes wearing white coats. The Flexner Report is not a warning sign because homeopathy would have been entirely correct. It is a warning sign because it shows how effortlessly the label “scientific” can be attached to an economic decision—and how long that label sticks.
For over a century. And it still sticks.
Notes
(1) New York Times, September 29, 1916.
(2)Dana Ullman: Rockefeller, the Flexner Report, and the American Medical Association: The Contentious Relationship Between Conventional Medicine and Homeopathy in America. In: Cureus. Journal of Medical Science 17 (2025), Issue 7, Article e87291, DOI 10.7759/cureus. 87291, section “The Carnegie Foundation’s Flexner Report and Its Impact on Medical Education” . Full text: https://www.cureus.com/articles/370572 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12318542/
(3) Ullman (2025), section “The contentious relationship between homeopathy and allopathy in the 19th century,” citing Dana Ullman: The Homeopathic Revolution: Why Famous People and Cultural Heroes Choose Homeopathy. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2007, pp. 63–74.
(4) Ibid., citing Ullman: The Homeopathic Revolution (2007), pp. 229–251.
(5) William G. Rothstein: American Physicians in the Nineteenth Century. From Sects to Science. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972, p. 160, cited in Ullman (2025).
(6) Paul Starr: The Social Transformation of American Medicine. New York: Basic Books,
1982, p. 97, cited in Ullman (2025). The work was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (Nonfiction) and the Bancroft Prize in 1984. Overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Transformation_of_American_Medicine
(7) Ullman (2025), citing Harris L. Coulter: Divided Legacy: The Conflict Between Homoeopathy and the American Medical Association (= Divided Legacy, Vol. III). Washington, D.C.: Wehawken Book Co., 1973 (new edition Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books), pp. 101–139, as well as Rothstein (1972), p. 170.
(8) Ullman (2025), section on Hahnemann and the pharmacists (23 changes of residence in 15 years).
(9) Rothstein (1972), p. 170, cited in Ullman (2025); founding of the AMA in 1847, two years after the American Institute of Homeopathy (1844).
(10) Ullman (2025), section on the “consultation clause,” citing Coulter: Divided Legacy, Vol. III (1973), p. 208.
(11) The Carnegie Foundation had been officially established in 1905 as a pension fund for college professors. But this inevitably gave rise to a much larger program: In order to determine which institutions were considered “genuine” colleges and which faculty members were eligible for pensions, the Foundation had to develop admission criteria—and these criteria became the most widely used basis for admission requirements and teaching guidelines at American colleges and universities as a whole.
(12) The New York Times, cited in Coulter: Divided Legacy, Vol. III (1973), p. 314, reproduced in Ullman (2025); Ullman (2025), section “The Carnegie Foundation’s Flexner Report” (agreement between Henry S. Pritchett and Arthur Bevan; Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as the front organization).
(13) Ibid.
(14) Ibid.; regarding Simon Flexner as the first director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and an opponent of “sectarian medicine.”
(15) Ibid. (joint visits with Nathan Colwell, secretary of the AMA Council on Medical Education).
(16) Ibid. (no recorded meeting with the American Institute of Homeopathy).
(17) Henry S. Pritchett to Arthur Bevan, six months before publication, cited in Ullman (2025) ( “When our report comes out, it is going to be ammunition in your hands …”).
(18) AMA publication on Nathan Colwell (“provided far more guidance in this famous survey than is generally known”), cited in Coulter: Divided Legacy, Vol. III (1973), p. 446, reproduced in Ullman (2025).
(19) Ullman (2025) (“Some historians simply and directly assert that the AMA ‘engineered’ this report”).
(20) Ibid. For contemporary criticism, see also Robert P. Hiatt / [J. S. Hiatt]: Around the Continent in 180 Days: The Controversial Journey of Abraham Flexner. In: The Pharos of Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society 62 (1999), pp. 18–24 (pp. 73–87 of the issue cited by Ullman).
(21) Thomas P. Duffy: The Flexner Report – 100 Years Later. In: The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 84 (2011), Issue 3, pp. 269–276, PMCID PMC3178858, on the German university model and the Johns Hopkins model, as well as the “full-time system” ; cf. Ullman (2025) on William Osler’s critique of the full-time model. Full text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3178858/
(22) Abraham Flexner: Medical Education in the United States and Canada. A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (= Bulletin Number Four) . New York: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1910, cited in Ullman (2025) (“The ebbing vitality of homeopathic schools is a striking demonstration of the incompatibility of science and dogma”).
(23) Ullman (2025) (Flexner on chiropractors as “unconscionable quacks,” on eclectics as “drug mad”).
(24) Duffy (2011), section “The Flexner Report – The Path Not Taken” (“The success of the reorganized medical training has been awesome in the breadth and depth of understanding and discovery”).
(25) David J. Skorton (President and CEO of the AAMC), quoted in: AAMC renames prestigious Abraham Flexner award in light of racist and sexist writings. Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC News), Washington, D.C., 2020/2021. https://www.aamc.org/news/aamc-renames-prestigious-abraham-flexner-award-light-racist-and-sexist-writings
(26) Ibid. (“within 15 years, 89 of the original 155 schools had closed”); cf. Duffy (2011).
(27) Ullman (2025)
(28) Ibid. (Closure of nearly all women’s colleges following the report).
(29) E. Richard Brown: Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979, p. 149, cited in Ullman (2025) (Flexner on women in the medical profession). Digital copy: https://digitalcommons.rockefeller.edu/the-rockefellers/37/
(30) AAMC (2020/2021) and Ullman (2025): five out of seven historically Black medical schools closed; only Howard and Meharry were deemed worth preserving.
(31) Kendall M. Campbell / Irma Corral / Jhojana L. Infante Linares / Dmitry Tumin: Projected Estimates of African American Medical Graduates of Closed Historically Black Medical Schools. In: JAMA Network Open 3 (2020), Issue 8, Article e2015220, DOI 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.15220 (an estimated 35,315 additional graduates by 2019; +29% for 2019 alone). Full text: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2769569 — Note on citation: The DOI 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020. 12833 cited in the inquiry does not refer to this study; the correct DOI is 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.15220. For a critical assessment of the model assumptions (steady- and rapid-expansion models), see opposing views, such as Physician Outlook (2022), https://physicianoutlook.com/2022/06/15/was-flexner-a-misogynistic-racist/
(32) AAMC (2020/2021)
(33) Ibid. (“The Flexner report exacerbated systemic racism in medicine”).
(34) Ullman (2025), Introduction “Rockefeller’s use of and advocacy for homeopathy”
(35) Ibid., citing Ron Chernow: Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. New York: Random House, 1998, pp. 319 and 321.
(36) John D. Rockefeller, 1916 (“I am a homeopathist. I desire that homeopathists should have fair, courteous, and liberal treatment …”), quoted from Coulter: Divided Legacy, Vol. III (1973), p. 314, cited in Ullman (2025).
(37) John D. Rockefeller, 1919, on the General Education Board (“Homeopathic teaching should not be excluded; it should be provided for, just as allopathic teaching is”), ibid.
(38) Ullman (2025)
(39) Ibid., citing Chernow: Titan (1998), p. 566.
(40) Chernow: Titan (1998), pp. 478–479, cited in Ullman (2025) (Gates’ “real aim … to deliver a mortal blow to homeopaths—to shut their medical schools, expel them from medical societies, and strip them of hospital privileges—so as to clear the field for scientific medicine”) .
(41) Ullman (2025), citing Chernow: Titan (1998), p. 404 (Abraham Flexner served on the General Education Board from 1912 to 1928).
(42) Charles S. Bryan / M. Shawn Stinson: The Choice: Lewellys F. Barker and the Full-Time Plan. In: Annals of Internal Medicine 137 (2002), Issue 6, pp. 521–525. DOI 10.7326/0003-4819-137-6-200209170-00013.
(43) On the role of foundations during this era, see Howard S. Berliner: A System of Scientific Medicine: Philanthropic Foundations in the Flexner Era. New York/London: Tavistock, 1985. Catalog entry: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/kax2jk5p
(44) Harvey Cushing: *The Life of Sir William Osler*. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925 (Pulitzer Prize 1926)
(45) Thomas P. Duffy: “The Flexner Report – 100 Years Later.” In: The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 84 (2011), Issue 3, pp. 269–276, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51687172_The_Flexner_Report_-_100_Years_Later (“Their voices were hushed by the irresistible seduction of large sums of money tied to the implementation of the full -time system”); on Osler’s assessment of Flexner’s “very feeble grasp of medicine,” see Ullman (2025), citing Hiatt: Around the Continent in 180 Days, Pharos 62 (1999), pp. 18–24 (p. 19 there).
(46) According to Ernest R. Booth: *History of Osteopathy and Twentieth-Century Medical Practice*. 2nd ed., Cincinnati, OH: Jennings and Graham, 1905, pp. 213–214; James C. Whorton: “From Cultism to CAM: The Flexner Report Reconsidered.” In: *Complementary Health Practice Review* 6 (2001), Issue 2, pp. 113–125. DOI 10.1177/153321010100600202 — Full text (PDF): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/153321010100600202)
(47) Dana Ullman: Rockefeller, the Flexner Report, and the American Medical Association. In: Cureus 17 (2025), Issue 7, Article e87291, https://www.cureus.com/articles/370572,
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12318542
(48) See Harald Wiesendanger: The Healthcare System—How to Understand, Survive, and Transform It (2019), Chapter 5, pp. 173–188.
(49) Ullman (2025), section “George H. Simmons, MD, and the New AMA” (Simmons’s ten-year homeopathic practice prior to his career at the AMA).
(50) Ibid., citing Peter A. Swenson: Disorder: A History of Reform, Reaction, and Money in American Medicine. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021, p. 61 (advertisement in JAMA as implicit AMA approval → higher ad rates).
(51) Ibid.; JAMA’s advertising revenue according to Starr: Social Transformation (1982), p. 134 ($33,760 in 1899, $150,000 in 1909); AMA membership rose from 8,000 (1900) to over 70,000 (1910) .
(52) George H. Simmons to his successor Morris Fishbein, quoted in Swenson: Disorder (2021), pp. 432–433, reproduced in Ullman (2025) (comparison to “Faust trying to make a deal with Mephistopheles”).
(53) Ullman (2025), concluding assessment that most homeopaths in fact practiced eclectically and that the accusation of dogmatism applied equally to the “regulars.” This assessment is that of the cited (homeopathy-aligned) author and is identified as such here.
(54) Cf. the popular Rockefeller narrative in Chris Kanthan’s How Rockefeller Founded Modern Medicine and Killed Natural Cures. Global Research, March 9, 2023 (first published October 2015), https://www.globalresearch.ca/how-rockefeller-founded-modern-medicine-killed-natural-cures/5711818, as well as Joseph Mercola: How Medicine Was Corrupted: Difficult Times Ahead – How to Break Free From the System. Global Research, July 29, 2022, https://www.globalresearch.ca/how-medicine-corrupted-difficult-times-ahead-how-break-free-from-system/5788215.
Scientific Articles and Reports
● Kendall M. Campbell / Irma Corral / Jhojana L. Infante Linares / Dmitry Tumin: Projected Estimates of African American Medical Graduates from Closed Historically Black Medical Schools. In: JAMA Network Open 3
(2020), Issue 8, Article e2015220. DOI 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.15220. — https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2769569
● Thomas P. Duffy: The Flexner Report – 100 Years Later. In: The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 84 (2011), Issue 3, pp. 269–276. PMCID PMC3178858. — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3178858/
● Robert P. Hiatt: Around the Continent in 180 Days: The Controversial Journey of Abraham Flexner. In: The Pharos of Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society 62 (1999), pp. 18–24.
● Dana Ullman: Rockefeller, the Flexner Report, and the American Medical Association: The Contentious Relationship Between Conventional Medicine and Homeopathy in America. In: Cureus. Journal of Medical Science 17 (2025), Issue 7, Article e87291. DOI 10.7759/cureus.87291. — https://www.cureus.com/articles/370572 · https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12318542/
Monographs
● Howard S. Berliner: A System of Scientific Medicine: Philanthropic Foundations in the Flexner Era. New York/London: Tavistock, 1985. — https://wellcomecollection.org/works/kax2jk5p
● E. Richard Brown: Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979. — https://digitalcommons.rockefeller.edu/the-rockefellers/37/
● Ron Chernow: Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. New York: Random House, 1998.
● Harris L. Coulter: Divided Legacy: The Conflict Between Homeopathy and the American Medical Association (= Divided Legacy, Vol. III). Washington, D.C.: Wehawken Book Co., 1973 (new edition Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books).
● Abraham Flexner: Medical Education in the United States and Canada. A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (= Bulletin Number Four). New York: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1910.
● Martin Kaufman: Homeopathy in America: The Rise and Fall of a Medical Heresy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.
● William G. Rothstein: American Physicians in the Nineteenth Century. From Sects to Science. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972.
● Paul Starr: The Social Transformation of American Medicine. New York: Basic Books, 1982. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Transformation_of_American_Medicine
● Peter A. Swenson: Disorder: A History of Reform, Reaction, and Money in American Medicine. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021.
Other
● Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC): AAMC renames prestigious Abraham Flexner award in light of racist and sexist writings. AAMC News, Washington, D.C., 2020/2021. — https://www.aamc.org/news/aamc-renames-prestigious-abraham-flexner-award-light-racist-and-sexist-writings
● Chris Kanthan: How Rockefeller Founded Modern Medicine and Killed Natural Cures. Global Research, March 9, 2023 (originally published in October 2015). — https://www.globalresearch.ca/how-rockefeller-founded-modern-medicine-killed-natural-cures/5711818
● Joseph Mercola: How Medicine Was Corrupted: Difficult Times Ahead – How to Break Free From the System. Global Research, July 29, 2022. — https://www.globalresearch.ca/how-medicine-corrupted-difficult-times-ahead-how-break-free-from-system/5788215