Medical Education In 18th-century colonial America, those who wanted to become physicians either learned as personal students from established professionals or went abroad to study in the traditional schools of London, Paris, and Edinburgh. Medicine was first taught formally by specialists at the University of Pennsylvania, beginning in 1765, and in 1767 at Kings College , the first institution in the colonies to give the degree of doctor of medicine. Following the American Revolution, the Columbia medical faculty was combined with the College of Physicians and Surgeons, chartered in 1809, which survives as a division of Columbia University. In 1893 the Johns Hopkins Medical School required all applicants to have a college degree and was the first to afford its students the opportunity to further their training in an attached teaching hospital. The growth of medical schools attached with established institutions of learning went together with the development of proprietary schools of medicine run for personal profit, most of which had low standards and poor facilities. In 1910 Abraham Flexner, the American education reformer, wrote Medical Education in the United States and Canada, exposing the poor conditions of most proprietary schools. Subsequently, the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges laid down standards for course content, qualifications of teachers, laboratory facilities, connection with teaching hospitals, and licensing of medical professionals that survive to this day. |