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  • Reforming Medical Education: The University of Illinois College of Medicine, 1880-1920
  • Gert H. Brieger
Winton U. Solberg . Reforming Medical Education: The University of Illinois College of Medicine, 1880-1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. xiv + 309 pp. Ill. $35.00 (978-0-252-03359-9).

Winton U. Solberg, professor emeritus of history at the University of Illinois and the author of the first volume of the university's history from 1894 to 1904, [End Page 140] intended to make the story of the medical school a chapter in his next volume. He found so much rich material in the archives that he decided that the medical story deserved an entire volume of its own, and even so this book covers only the four decades between 1880, just before the College of Physicians was founded, and 1920, by which time it had become a university medical school.

Medical school histories are a complex, even vexed, genre. I can speak from personal experience. Providing a proper context so as to avoid the inherent celebratory and parochial tome is no small challenge. Solberg, fortunately, has been able to transcend such problems by giving us a complex and fascinating glimpse into the geopolitics of Chicago medical education. He clearly took to heart Henry Pritchett's early-twentieth-century dictum that the history of medical education is primarily a matter of education, not of medicine.

Chicago, at the end of the nineteenth century, boasted fourteen medical schools and thus was deemed a plague spot by Abraham Flexner and other medical reformers. Only three of the city's medical schools were judged to be good ones by the standards of the time: Rush Medical College, which for a time was affiliated with the University of Chicago; the Chicago Medical College, which became the Northwestern University School of Medicine; and the College of Physicians and Surgeons, which was founded in the early 1880s and which, in the twentieth century, in stages, became the medical school of the University of Illinois. These three schools had faculty members with national and even international reputations. Doctors such as Arthur Dean Bevan, Ludwig Hektoen, John B. Murphy, James B. Herrick, William Allen Pusey, and Frank Billings, to name just some, occupied faculty positions at these medical schools at varying times.

Solberg's hero is Edmund J. James, who was president of the University of Illinois from 1904 to 1920. Trained as a political economist in Germany, where he saw firsthand the relationship of medical education to the universities, it was James who had the vision to turn a good proprietary medical school into an outstanding university medical department. The political jockeying, the upstate-downstate tensions, the complex relations and crosstown rivalries, and the strong medical sectarian presence in Chicago all were hurdles that James had to overcome in order to fashion the kind of outstanding medical school he envisioned for his university.

Solberg does discuss the medical students of the time, some of what they were taught, and how they behaved. But the emphasis in this history of the College of Physicians that became the Medical College of the University is on organization, financing, and administration. I know of few such histories that have such rich detail about the tensions between the medical schools of the city, the relationship of the university to the legislature, and of the medical faculty to the rest of the university in downstate Illinois. Surely Solberg was correct to realize that this was a story for far more than a chapter or two. Because of his extensive research and his skill in presenting us with the development of the medical school one can hear the wrangles of the politicians, the debates among the faculties, and the clashes with the philanthropic foundations. Probably Illinois was not so unique, [End Page 141] but rare is the history of a medical school that makes fascinating reading, even for a nonalumnus.

Gert H. Brieger
Johns Hopkins University
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