Doctors on Horseback, Pioneers of American Medicine caught my attention for several reasons. It came to my attention while hunting for writings about Daniel Drake, one of the doctors written about in the book. However when I found this title I had already collected and read several biographies of Drake and much of his own writings so I did not expect to learn much from one chapter in a book over seventy years old. Although I had not read as much about some of the other names in the book, many of them associated with Drake in one way or another, the books age, in my opinion, meant it would not reveal very much. But there was the author to consider, James T. Flexner was a very well respected historian in his era and this was the first of many books he published. What I found most intriguing was his family. His father was a renowned microbiologist who found a cure for spinal meningitis and studied polio but it was who his uncle was that made me decide to read the book.

Abraham Flexner was an educator, like Drake he taught in Louisville Kentucky and worked to improve education. Flexner was concerned with education in general while Drake cared about medical education in particular. In 1908 Abraham Flexner was picked by the Carnegie Institute to lead a study on professional education in the United States. Although he had never attended or worked in a medical school he willingly took the assignment. Because the Carnegie Institute was best known for handing out large grants Flexner received full cooperation from the nation’s medical schools. The 1910 Flexner Report exposed the problems of “for profit” education and changed the landscape of medical education in the United States and the world. Flexner mentioned Drake in the report and adopted recommendations that Drake had made over a half century before. How, I wondered, would Abraham’s nephew treat Drake?

I should not have bothered. Like most US history written before the 1960’s this was simply another volume of uncritical WASP mythology. If you are interested in really learning about doctors on horseback look at Washington’s Medical Apartheid, Nuland’s The Doctors' Plague, Rothstein’s American Medical Schools and the Practice of Medicine, or Starr’s The Social Transformation of American Medicine. Don’t waste your time with this book. ( )