[Sticky] The Rockefellers And The Flexnar Report

"Germ Theory and Conventional Medicine”

At the turn of the 20th century, as Howard Berliner (1985) has documented, straight germ theory (germ x causes disease y) became established as the core of “scientific medicine” in American allopathic medical education. At the time, the major rivalry in American medicine was between allopaths (approximately 60% of medical practitioners) and homeopaths (approximately 30%, the balance being eclectics and physio-medicalists).
Once the substantial resources of the Rockefeller philanthropies were put behind scientific medical education based on germ theory—with the full consent of the AMA—American medicine became synonymous with the germ theory. This, the Flexner Report (1910), and medical research devoted to finding pharmaceuticals to defeat germs to “cure” disease, were all funded by Rockefeller philanthropies and lead to what is considered to be the dominant paradigm in American medicine.4
As Berliner documents, this was largely the result of a determination to put the Rockefeller philanthropic resources behind this concept of “scientific medicine” not, at the time, any clear clinical superiority on the part of the allopathic philosophy. As of the period in which this took place, largely 1900 to 1920, there was no clinical validation for scientific medicine in terms of the discovery of specific pharmaceuticals of demonstrated efficacy.
Be’champ, Bernard, and the Alternatives to Germ Theory
The concept of an alternative to the germ theory of disease traces to 2 French contemporaries of Louis Pasteur: Augustine Be’champ and Claude Bernard.
Be’champ’s theory was, put as simply as possible in the biological sense, that “germs” are always present in our environment and do not “cause” disease. Disease is related rather to the physiology of the host, the human (or mammalian) body, not to the germs per se. What we observe in microbiology relative to disease is the resultant byproduct of the body’s failed attempt to reject a pathogenic microbe, a function that a healthy body’s autoimmune system should accomplish.5
Bernard’s work in physiology was much celebrated in the 19th century. As noted by Charles Gross (1998): “Today the fame of Claude Bernard rests primarily (if not entirely) on his idea that the maintenance of the stability of the internal environment (milieu interieur) is a prerequisite for the development of a complex nervous system.” But as noted by Gross and others, while Bernard advanced this idea between 1854 and his death in 1874, it “had no impact for over 50 years after its formulation.” Why did this “insight that the ‘constancy of the internal environment is the condition for the free life’ (have) no significance (indeed no meaning) for biologists for more than 50 years?” One major reason was that “Pasteur’s new bacteriology and its omnipresent, omnipotent germs were dominating the biomedical Zeitgeist.”6
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The Early Integrators
In the pre-World War II years the work of 3 MDs that diverged from germ theory orthodoxy became central to the emergence of an alternative to conventional medicine medicine. These 3 MDs are Henry Lindlahr, William Charles Schulze, and Walter B. Cannon." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6380988/ — at Medically Challenged.

WHEN DID YOU FIRST LEARN ABOUT THE FLEXNER REPORT OF 1910? "The Flexner Report ― 100 Years Later - NCBI https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov › articles › PMC3178858 by TP Duffy · 2011 · Cited by 304 — The Flexner Report of 1910 transformed the nature and process of medical education in America with a resulting elimination of proprietary schools and the ... ‎THE HOPKINS CIRCLE · ‎THE FLEXNER REPORT · ‎THE FLEXNER REPORT... You've visited this page many times. Last visit: 2/25/21 People also ask What did the Flexner Report do? The Flexner Report of 1910 transformed the nature and process of medical education in America with a resulting elimination of proprietary schools and the establishment of the biomedical model as the gold standard of medical training. THE FLEXNER REPORT ― 100 YEARS LATER - NCBI"