Medicine and schools

The teaching

As the record of medicine since the Flexner Report of 1910 teaches it.

The claim, in its parts

The theory built on the Flexner Report runs like this. John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, through their foundations, used the report of 1910 to close the schools of natural healing, homeopathy and herbal medicine; they did it to create a market for drugs made from oil, which Rockefeller's companies refined; medicine has hidden cheap cures ever since to protect that trade; and the same foundations shaped the schools to turn out obedient workers. Each part makes a claim about the record, and each can be checked against it.

Where the claim came from

The theory grew in stages. Morris Bealle's The Drug Story of 1949 described a Rockefeller drug trust. G. Edward Griffin's World Without Cancer of 1974 claimed that a cure, laetrile, which he called vitamin B17, was being suppressed. A serious history of 1979, E. Richard Brown's Rockefeller Medicine Men, argued that the foundations shaped medicine to suit industry and the professions, and the theory has borrowed from it without its care. Eustace Mullins, a writer of antisemitic books, published his version in 1988, and from the 2000s the whole was retold online.

What Flexner found and asked for

Abraham Flexner found that many medical schools were businesses run for their owners' fees: they took students without a high school education, taught them by lecture alone, and had no laboratories worth the name and no wards where students could see patients. He called Chicago, with its many such schools, the plague spot of the country in medical education. He asked that a medical student first have at least two years of college science; that the course run four years, two in laboratory science and two in hospital wards; and that schools belong to universities, with teachers paid to teach and to research. His model was Johns Hopkins, which had opened its medical school in 1893 on just those lines.

Where medicines come from

The claim that medicine sells oil as cure and buries the plants does not survive a look at the pharmacy. Many medicines are built by chemists from simple starting materials, some of them from petroleum, as plastics and dyes are; but a great many were found in plants and moulds, and medicine went looking for them. Aspirin was made in 1897 from a compound modelled on the salicin of willow bark, which an English clergyman had reported in 1763 as a remedy for fevers. Digitalis came from the foxglove, studied by William Withering in 1785, quinine from cinchona bark, morphine from the poppy, and the cancer drug paclitaxel from the bark of the Pacific yew, found by a government programme that screened thousands of plants. Artemisinin, now the first treatment for malaria, was found by Tu Youyou in 1972 by searching old Chinese herbal texts, and won her a Nobel prize.

Penicillin came from a mould, and the Oxford team that made it into a medicine was paid in part by the Rockefeller Foundation. The plants themselves are not safe medicines: foxglove can stop a heart and willow bark harms the stomach, and the reason medicine purifies, measures and tests a plant's active part is that the same leaf can heal at one dose and kill at another. Nothing here is a reason to treat oneself from a garden.

The hidden cure: laetrile

The cure most often said to be hidden is laetrile, made from amygdalin, which is found in apricot kernels, and sold as a cancer treatment from the 1950s. Because so many people believed in it, the American National Cancer Institute sponsored a clinical trial at the Mayo Clinic and other centres. Its results, published in 1982, followed 178 patients: none was cured or held steady by it, it neither eased symptoms nor lengthened life, and some patients showed signs of cyanide poisoning, which amygdalin releases in the body. Apricot kernels themselves have poisoned people who ate them as a remedy. A hidden cure would have been the making of any doctor, hospital or country that proved it; this one was tested in the open, and failed.

What the foundations paid for

The Rockefeller money is real, and so is what it bought. The Rockefeller Institute in New York, founded in 1901, was where Peyton Rous found in 1911 that a virus could cause cancer, and where Oswald Avery and his colleagues showed in 1944 that DNA carries hereditary information. The Rockefeller Foundation's laboratories produced the yellow fever vaccine for which Max Theiler won a Nobel prize, and its Sanitary Commission led a campaign against hookworm across the American South, examining and treating great numbers of people. None of it sold oil, and much of it made cheap prevention possible.

The schooling charge

The last part of the claim, that the same foundations shaped schools to turn out obedient workers, rests on a single patronising essay about country schools. The board's own record points the other way. The General Education Board paid for officials who campaigned for public high schools across the South, gave large sums to colleges and universities, Black colleges among them, and in 1917 funded the Lincoln School in New York, an experimental school that Abraham Flexner himself had proposed, to teach science and modern subjects by inquiry in place of rote.

A system that was tested

Homeopathy, whose schools closed when they could not meet the new standards, was not so much suppressed as tested. It holds that a substance that causes a symptom cures it when diluted, and that the more dilute, the stronger; its common preparations are diluted past the point where any molecule of the original is likely to remain. When the Australian government's medical research council reviewed the evidence in 2015, it found no health condition for which homeopathy worked better than a placebo. Remedies from many traditions have been tested the same way, and those that passed, like artemisinin, entered medicine.

Real wrongs, and how they were proven

Medicine has real wrongs, and they are known as any real conspiracy is known: from documents and courts. Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, pleaded guilty in 2007 to misleading doctors and patients about the drug's risk of addiction, and in 2020 to three federal crimes, among them conspiracy to defraud the United States. Such cases show that distrust of a company can be earned, and how it is proven: by the company's own records, opened in court, not by a theory about a whole profession.

When the theory names a people

Theories about poisoners have often named a people. When the Black Death came in 1348, Jews were accused of poisoning the wells; confessions were taken under torture, and Jewish communities were massacred across Germany, Switzerland and France, the Jews of Strasbourg burned in February 1349. Pope Clement VI answered in two bulls of 1348 that Jews were dying of the plague like everyone else, and that it raged where no Jews lived. In 1953 the Soviet press announced a plot of doctors, most of them Jews, to murder the country's leaders; weeks after Stalin's death the government admitted that the charges were invented and the confessions forced. Both were antisemitic lies, false in every part, and any version of the medical theory that turns it against Jews, as some do, repeats them.

How the record is made

What separates a cure from a claim is the fair test, and its method is open to anyone. In 1747 the naval surgeon James Lind gave six pairs of sailors with scurvy six different treatments, and found that those given oranges and lemons recovered. In 1948 Britain's Medical Research Council tested streptomycin against tuberculosis by assigning patients to treatment by chance, so that no doctor's hopes could tilt the result: the first modern randomised trial. Blinding, in which neither patients nor doctors know who received what, keeps expectation out; a placebo shows how much of a change comes from being treated at all; and reviews that gather every trial on a question show what holds. A treatment that passes these tests becomes medicine, whoever found it, a village healer or a company.