On Idle thoughts and Flexner

by reestheskin on 18/11/2020

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I have previously commented on Abraham Flexner on this site. The Flexner report is the most influential review of US medical education ever published, although some would argue that the changes it recommended were already working their way through the system. For a long time I was unaware of another project of his, an article with the title The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge 1. For me, there are echoes of Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness and the fact that Flexner’s essay was published at the onset of World War 2 adds anther dimension to the topic.

As for medical education, the ever-growing pressure is to teach so much that many students don’t have time to learn anything. I wish some other comments from Flexner opened any GMC dicta on what a university medical education should be all about.

“Now I sometimes wonder,” he wrote, “whether there would be sufficient opportunity for a full life if the world were emptied of some of the useless things that give it spiritual significance; in other words, whether our conception of what is useful may not have become too narrow to be adequate to the roaming and capricious possibilities of the human spirit.”

  1. The essay originally published in Harper’s Magazine was republished with a companion essay by Robbert Dijkgraaf by Princeton University Press in 2017.