Technology and American medical practice 1880–1930: an anthology of sources

Following the leadership of an imaginative dean, the medical school, in Wilson's view, was prepared by 1909 to make changes in training and personnel that would have lifted the education of physicians out of the jumble of self-interest and narrow aims of nineteenthcentury schools and into a new era of university education as broad as it was deep. Two closely timed events, however, prevented this change. The first was the "brutal" (to use Wilson's term) re-organization of the medical faculty by university president George Vincent in 1913. Looking to bring the medical school up to the standards of disinterest and commitment to scholarship that he felt characterized university life, Vincent fired more than half the medical faculty. His action not only demoralized the remaining teachers, who saw valued colleagues simply cast aside, it also killed the faculty's own plan for full-time, paid positions that were a hallmark of modern medical education. This institutional insult was followed immediately by a bitter dispute over whether or not the university medical school should affiliate with the clinical empire of the Mayo brothers. The Mayo Clinic was seen by some faculty as a desirable opportunity to associate the school with the nation's foremost surgical clinic; by others, the move was seen as pandering to the commercialism of the past. This destructive debate, coupled with World War I and the economic challenges of the post-war years, put the medical school into a slump from which it did not rise until the 1930s. The Minnesota Medical School would go on to be among the leading schools in the United States, becoming especially well known in the 1950s for innovations in open-heart surgery. At its best, Wilson's commemorative history allows a narrative of change to emerge from the texture of choices, blunders, and insights that remind us how all historical change is finally particular and local. As a commemoration of the school's first century, the study does not attempt to compare Minnesota with other institutions, and Wilson rarely ventures observations that explicitly link Minnesota history to national or even regional change. Wilson goes beyond many commemorative histories, however, in his successful integration of administrative and political history with the history of basic science and clinical medicine, thus avoiding a simple study of trustees' meetings and the like. But, as with most other such histories, he gives little sustained attention to medical students-their lives, aspirations, and points of view. It is more difficult to commemorate students than a new building. Yet historians of medical schools need to remember the individuals on whom the school had its most immediate effect and who came to embody the school in their care for people.