For decades, educators, historians, and social commentators accorded major responsibility for the reform of medical education in the United States to the Flexner Report of 1910. More recently, historians have begun to challenge the impact of the Report and the desirability of the changes attributed to it. This volume takes the themes articulated in the Report and traces their development. With each theme being discussed by a specialist in the subject area, the book provides a comprehensive review of medical education in the twentieth century. These themes, many of which have not been discussed in other books, include the basic sciences, the clinical curriculum, women in medicine, black medical education, and sectarian medical education. In addition, the volume includes chapters on the evolution of the health care delivery system, trends in financing medical education, the use of outpatient settings for clinical education, the current status of the medical curriculum and needed changes, and health manpower needs. The work concludes with a chapter discussing the current proposals for change and how they relate to the problems and reforms of the Flexner era. The work will be of interest to medical school administrators, policy makers, and faculty members as well as to practicing physicians.

Sixty million Americans have relied at some point in their lives on osteopaths, chiropractors, folk or religious healers, naturopaths, homeopaths, and acupuncturists; millions more employ alternative psychological systems, unorthodox diet and fitness programs, and a range of self-help treatments. Yet until recently, most historians and social scientists of medicine have assumed that unorthodox movements were of comparatively minor significance in the study of medicine and society.

In "Other Healers" Norman Gevitz and eight other authors explore the most significant alternatives to orthodox medicine to have gained a place in American society from the early 19th century to the present. Neither advocating nor debunking these alternatives, they explore phenomena that range from Thomsonism, the early botanical system that was progenitor of the first native American sects, to the faith-healing of contemporary pentecostals and charasmatics; from the Water Cure Movement, which provided important support for the efforts of early feminist reformers, to osteopathy, whose practitioners are now licensed to offer the same range of services as M.D.'s.