Abraham Flexner Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education... no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.

Abraham Flexner
The world in which we live is the only world about which our senses can testify.

Abraham Flexner
Science, in the very act of solving problems, creates more of them.

Abraham Flexner
The new naval treaty permits the United States to spend a billion dollars on warships-a sum greater than has been accumulated by all our endowed institutions of learning in their entire history. Unintelligence could go no further!... In Great Britain, the situation is similar.... Until the figures are reversed,... nations deceive themselves as to what they care about most.

Abraham Flexner
The physician thinks, decides, and orders; the pharmacist obeys — obeys, of course, with discretion, intelligence, and skill — yet, in the end, obeys and does not originate. Pharmacy therefore is an arm added to the medical profession, a specially and distinctly higher form of handicraft, not a profession...

Abraham Flexner
The physician's function is fast becoming social and preventive, rather than individual and curative.

Abraham Flexner
Anatomy and physiology form but the vestibule of medical education. They teach the normal structure of the body, the normal function of the parts, fluids, organs, and the conditions under which they operate. The next step carries the student in medias res; he begins pharmacology - the experimental study of the response of the body to medication.

Abraham Flexner
Men possessed of vague preconceived ideas are strongly disposed to force facts to fit, defend, or explain them. And this tendency both interferes with the free search for truth and limits the good which can be extracted from such truth as is in its despite attained.

Abraham Flexner
Science lies in the intellect, not in the instruments.

Abraham Flexner
We have indeed in America medical practitioners not inferior to the best elsewhere; but there is probably no other country in the world in which there is so great a distance and so fatal a difference between the best, the average, and the worst.

Abraham Flexner
The physician is constantly in contact with disease processes that he is unable to correlate with the accompanying structural modifications. Occasionally the surgeon throws a stream of light upon such a situation; too often all is dark until the autopsy reveals the truth.

Abraham Flexner
Physiology is, in a sense, the central discipline of the medical school. It is the business of the physician to restore normal functioning: normal functioning is thus his starting-point in thought, his goal in action.

Abraham Flexner
So long as men strive to transcend their native powers, to rid themselves of prejudice and preconception, to observe phenomena in a dry light, the effort is scientific, whether at the moment it attains mathematical accuracy or not.

Abraham Flexner
The student is to collect and evaluate facts. The facts are locked up in the patient.

Abraham Flexner