Exhibit 043

Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America

Exhibit 043 · Scholarly monograph

Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America

The rate of consolidation and elimination of medical schools was as rapid before the report as after.

Archival history of the Rockefeller and Carnegie medical programs, drawn from the Rockefeller Family Archives, the Gates collection and GEB files, and the Carnegie Foundation's AMA correspondence. Brown documents the AMA–Carnegie collaboration (pp. 142–152), the GEB full-time plan and its contracts (pp. 156–176), and Gates's productivity and social-order rationale (pp. 106–133). He gives school counts of 166 (1904), 133 (1910), 104 (1915) and 76 (1929) (p. 85), and the council's 1907 ratings of 160 schools as 82 class A, 46 class B and 32 class C (p. 140). He records that the five disapproved Black schools closed and that women stayed under 5 percent of graduates from 1900 to the Second World War (p. 154). He denies an investment motive: "The Rockefellers did not have any significant investment in Southern textile mills" (p. 116).

Source: E. Richard Brown (University of California Press)
Date: 1979
Quoted from: p. 154
Grade: Peer-reviewed
Document: https://archive.org/details/rockefellermedic00browrich
Accessed: 2026-11-09
Cited by: Findings citing this exhibit
Note: Brown labels his account of Simon Flexner proposing his brother as an inference (p. 144; note 24, p. 257). His GEB totals vary by page and basis: some $50 million contributed by 1928, more than $78 million appropriated by 1929, more than $82 million applied by 1930 (pp. 57, 155, 193).

Cited by

Finding MED-1.1: Primary record Rockefeller money was committed to laboratory medicine before the Flexner Report, through the Rockefeller Institute in 1901 and the Sanitary Commission in 1909.
Finding MED-1.2: Primary record The AMA's Council on Medical Education started the Flexner study. The Carnegie Foundation paid for it and published it.
Finding MED-1.3: Reported The Carnegie Foundation and the AMA agreed to keep their collaboration on the Flexner Report out of public view.
Finding MED-1.5: Primary record Rockefeller's General Education Board spent $94 million on 25 medical schools between 1913 and 1929, directed by Abraham Flexner and tied to a full-time clinical faculty.
Finding MED-1.6: Reported The General Education Board enforced its plan through contracts that required a school to return its endowment if it departed from the plan, and later through schools' need for further grants.
Finding MED-1.7: Reported Frederick Gates justified Rockefeller medical philanthropy in internal memos by worker productivity, control of physicians' fees, and social order.
Finding MED-1.9: Peer-reviewed Five of the seven Black medical schools closed after the reform, and women remained under 5 percent of medical graduates until the Second World War.
Finding MED-10.1: Reported Ivan Illich wrote that nearly 90 percent of the 1860–1965 decline in the combined death rate of children up to fifteen from scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough and measles came before antibiotics and widespread immunization, citing R. R. Porter's 1971 address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Finding MED-10.3: Primary record Measles cases in the United States fell by more than 95 percent after the vaccine was licensed in 1963.