Abstract

When Flexner wrote about medical education at the beginning of the 20th century, he articulated and amplified the emerging view that medical education and the practice of medicine should be grounded in scientific method and that medical education belonged in the province of the university, an environment dedicated to original scholarship and investigation (Cooke et al. 2006; Flexner 1910; Ludmerer 2010). To learn to treat medical uncertainty the way a scientist frames hypotheses, medical students, he argued, required participatory, hands-on experience, as well as a focus on the development of independent problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. The intimate linkage between research (which moves the frontier ..