Iconoclast: Abraham Flexner and a Life in Learning

Iconoclast: Abraham Flexner and a Life in Learning. By Thomas Neville Bonner. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2002. Pp. xvi + 376. $36.

Just before Tom Bonner died in September 2003, at age 80, the book review editor of this journal invited me to write about Flexner's influence on medical education, using my comment on the book's dust jacket as a starting point. I had written: "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."

The careers of Flexner and Bonner were exceptions to the increasing specialization of professional lives that began in the closing decades of the 19th century. Both Flexner and Bonner were teachers as well as managers and innovators in complex organizations. Both were disciplined researchers who also wrote persuasive plain-style prose. Moreover, both transcended humble origins as a result of intelligence, charm, and diligence, and both attracted effective mentors.

Flexner and Bonner made substantial contributions to scholarship during careers as responsible officials in significant institutions. Flexner was an executive for the Carnegie and then the Rockefeller philanthropies from 1910 through the 1920s, when leading foundations were surrogates for government in creating new health policy. he was subsequently the founding president of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Flexner wrote influential reports, articles, and books, not just about medical education but, in Bonners words, as a "reformer and critic of the way Americans learn, from elementary school through postgraduate study" (ix). Bonner was president of the University of New Hampshire, Way ne State University, and Union College, provost at the University of Cincinnati, an aide to Senator George McGovern, and a candidate for Congress. he bracketed this career with seven distinguished books on the history of medicine.

Conner's Flexner is a scholar and activist...