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Rush Rhees, University of Rochester President (1900-1935); Abraham Flexner, well-known educator; George Eastman, founder, Eastman Kodak Company; George H. Whipple, M.D., Founder and Dean (1921-1954) of the School of Medicine and Dentistry. |
At the dawn of the 1920s, some of the most progressive minds in Rochester and in the nation united to change the course of medicine. Their words are etched in the past, but they also echo and live today as we plan for the future.
In well-known educator Abraham Flexner’s critique of medical schools, Medical Education in the United States and Canada, he found four out of five medical schools so inadequate, he said they should be closed. When he looked to establish a medical school based on his philosophy of science in education in New York, he turned to the University of Rochester. Flexner told University President Rush Rhees that Rochester presented an ideal place for “a medical school of the highest order.” Rhees said he would support a medical school only if he had the resources to make it “unquestionably of the first class.”
Rhees and Flexner approached George Eastman, philanthropist and founder of the Eastman Kodak Co. At a fateful meeting with Rhees and Flexner in February 1920, Eastman, it was reported, saw the opportunity to do something great.
The ideas on which the school would be established were revolutionary yet simple: Medical schools should be affiliated with universities and have a dedicated, structured physician and scientific faculty. And, with Eastman’s backing, Rochester would have the unusual opportunity to build a medical center that would incorporate scientific inquiry, learning, and patient care all under one roof, supporting the powerful interaction of all three missions. Such foresight gave birth to the philosophy and practice of collaboration that today remains a fundamental characteristic — a genetic fingerprint — of the University of Rochester Medical Center.
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