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Abraham Flexner's 1910 exposé on medical education recommended that only two of the seven extant medical schools for blacks be preserved and that they should train their students to "serve their people humbly" as "sanitarians." Addressing charges of racism, this article traces the roots of the recommendation that blacks serve a limited professional role to the schools themselves and presents evidence that, in endorsing the continuance of Howard's and Meharry's medical programs, Flexner exhibited greater leniency than he had toward comparable schools for white students. Whether his recommendations to eliminate the other five schools were key factors in their extinction is addressed here by examining 1901-30 enrollment patterns. Those patterns suggest that actions of the American Medical Association and state licensing boards, combined with the broader problem of limited premedical educational opportunities for blacks, were more consequential than was the Flexner report both for the extinction of the schools and for the curtailed production of black doctors.

The following address was given at the Gold-Headed Cane Ceremony, University of California School of Medicine, on 3 June 1966. At this event on the eve of Commencement Day, the senior student who has been chosen by his classmates and professors in the Department of Medicine as the one who best exemplifies the qualities of a true physician is given a gold-headed cane. This carries on the English tradition of a cane which was passed from physician to physician from 1689 to 1825, and was carried successively by Drs. John Radcliffe, Richard Mead, Anthony Askew, David Pitcairn and Matthew Baillie. The original cane now rests in the Hall of the Royal College of Physicians in London.