From history to myth: productive engagement with the Flexnerian metanarrative in medical education

More than 100 years following its publication, the Flexner Report endures as a principal text in contemporary medical education. While recent scholarship has questioned popular conceptions of the report and attends to marginalized passages, explanations as to why the Flexner story endures as myth in medical education remain absent in the literature. From a Bourdieusian perspective applied to an archive of both primary and secondary texts related to the history, production, and reception of the Flexner Report, this work examines the events that led to the production of a mythological "Flexner" and what significance this has for repeated yet insufficient efforts towards improving medical education. Specifically, this work links the values, beliefs, and assumptions embedded in the Flexner mythology to the unintentional obstruction of wholesale curricular reform and suggests it is in productively struggling with the legacy of this myth that we may be better positioned to reconcile ourselves to the Flexner legacy and its implication for future training.