Iconoclast: Abraham Flexner and a Life in Learning

by Thomas Neville Bonner

Overview

Abraham Flexner (1866-1959), raised in Louisville, Kentucky in a family of poor Jewish immigrants from Germany, attended the Johns Hopkins University in the first decade of its existence. After graduating in 1886, he founded, four years before John Dewey's Chicago "laboratory school," a progressive experimental school in Louisville that won the attention of Harvard President Charles W. Eliot. After a successful nineteen years as teacher and principal, he turned his attention to medical education on behalf of the Carnegie Foundation. His 1910 survey -- known as the Flexner Report -- stimulated much-needed, radical changes in American medical schools. With its emphasis on full-time clinical teaching, it remains the most widely cited document on how doctors best learn their profession.

Flexner's subsequent projects -- a book on medical education in Europe and a comparative study of medical education in Europe and America -- remain unsurpassed in range and insight. For fifteen years a senior officer in the Rockefeller-supported General Education Board in New York City, he helped distribute grants -- more than 6 billion in today's dollars -- for education in medicine and other subjects and started the Lincoln School in 1917. His devastating critique of American higher education ("Intellectual inquiry, not job training, [is] the purpose of the university.") raised important questions, upsetting many educators. In 1930, Flexner created and led the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, convincing Albert Einstein to accept the first appointment at the new institute.

"Iconoclast is a thoughtful, wonderfully crafted, solidly researched account of an uncommon life that far exceeds Abraham Flexner's association with reform in medical education... Bonner's labors have produced a critical, insightful portrait of Flexner as a brilliant, tireless, extraordinarily persuasive visionary." -- Delese Wear, New England Journal of Medicine

"Bonner dissects Flexner's contribution with meticulous scholarship, avoiding all cheap adulation or debunking. This is an outstanding book." -- Ed Peile, British Medical Journal

"Excellent... Deeply researched, carefully presented... This thorough, creative biography adjusts our view of this powerful man so engaged in an astounding array of twentieth-century educational developments." -- Linda Eisenmann, H-Net

"Thanks to Thomas Bonner's Iconoclast, we finally have the biography Flexner deserves and readers seek." -- John R. Thelin, Journal of Higher Education

"An outstanding and thorough study of this remarkable American educator who, more than anyone before or since, defined what a medical school should be, left indelible marks on public education, and founded one of the most innovative centers of advanced study in the world. Bonner adroitly portrays in this masterful biography what America and the world owes to Flexner for his vision, creativity, tenacity, and advocacy of progressive education." -- John S. Haller, Jr., Journal of American History

"Few nonphysicians have had as profound and long-lasting an effect on modern American medicine as Abraham Flexner... An excellent book about a highly significant and neglected figure." -- Janet A. Tighe, Ph.D., JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association)

"At last we have a life of one of the most powerful shapers of medicine, science, and higher education. This beautifully crafted life of Flexner will rescue a giant of his times from fragmentation and, sometimes, misunderstanding. Bonner has written not only a very important book but a deeply thoughtful and searching interrogation of recurrent social and moral problems that take on life and meaning in a concrete, historical setting." -- John C. Burnham, Ohio State University

"Abraham Flexner was one of the great innovators in education of the twentieth-century. Thomas N. Bonner, a distinguished historian as well as an educator/manager, is the biographer Flexner deserves." -- Daniel M. Fox, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

"This biography is a solid, well-researched study of a towering figure in American biomedical research." -- Darwin Stapleton, Rockefeller Archive Center

"This is a brilliant, beautifully crafted, and much needed biography of one of the legendary figures in American medicine and higher education. Once again Thomas Bonner has shown that he is one of the great medical historians of our time." -- Kenneth M. Ludmerer, Washington University

"Though [Abraham] Flexner wrote an autobiography, until now we have had no comprehensive biography. Fortunately, Thomas Bonner has filled that gap with Iconoclast. As a former university president with significant experience working with donors, Bonner is well qualified to understand his subject." -- Martin Morse Wooster, Philanthropy

Product Details

BN ID:	2940157657222
Publisher:	Plunkett Lake Press
Publication date:	02/29/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	424
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

Thomas Neville Bonner (1923-2003), a widely known medical historian, earned a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and held bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Rochester. Distinguished Professor Emeritus and President Emeritus of Wayne State University, Bonner wrote five books on the history of medicine and education, including Medicine in Chicago (1957), To the Ends of the Earth (1992), Becoming a Physician: Medical Education in Great Britain, France, Germany and the United States, 1750-1945 (1996) and Iconoclast: Abraham Flexner and a Life in Learning (2002), and two textbooks. He received two Guggenheim Fellowships and was a Rockefeller Foundation Resident at Bellagio, Italy.

He was vice president and provost at the University of Cincinnati (1967-71) and president of the University of New Hampshire (1971-74), of Union College (1974–78), and of Wayne State University (1978-82). He retired from the Wayne State faculty in 1997. Bonner received major, multi-year grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Institutes of Health, and has been awarded three honorary degrees.