(Alternative title: Martin shows his ignorance again.)
James Nicoll resurrects a piece of interesting US medical history for the benefit of a silly Livejournal poll, asking his readers their opinion of the Flexner report:
The Report (also called Carnegie Foundation Bulletin Number Four) called on American medical schools to enact higher admission and graduation standards, and to adhere strictly to the protocols of mainstream science in their teaching and research. Many American medical schools fell short of the standard advocated in the Report, and subsequent to its publication, nearly half of such schools merged or were closed outright. The Report also concluded that there were too many medical schools in the USA, and that too many doctors were being trained. A repercussion of the Flexner Report resulting from the closure or consolidation of university training, was reversion of American universities to male-only admittance programs to accommodate a smaller admission pool. Universities had begun opening and expanding female admissions as part of women’s and co-educational facilities only in the mid-to-latter part of the 19th century with the founding of co-educational Oberlin College in 1833 and private colleges such as Vassar College and Pembroke College.
0wen Hatherley commenting on a half forgotten 1930ties cartoonist, Osbert Lancaster, a fellow with the same sort of progression as Betjeman in moving from Modernist to nostalgic defender of dear old England:
The 1930s work, from Pillar to Post and elsewhere, is still excellent – a precise, droll anatomisation of English building styles, with the admirable aim of making the English actually think about their environment for once. The absurdities of each idiom are neatly pricked, from the ‘Stockbroker Tudor’ pile with its streamline moderne car, glamour girl and adjacent pylon (which, amongst other things reveals just how old postmodernism is); to the ‘Functional Modern’ interior where the Bauhaus aesthete (apparently based on Herbert Read) sits bow-legged on an Aalto stool, oblivious to the fact that his sun-window gives onto pissing rain rather than light-air-openness.
The later cartoons – for the likes of the Daily Express or Anthony Powell’s epics of bourgeois manners, or for the theatre – still have a certain seedy charm, but are far less interesting. The architectural observations stay sharp, but elsewhere it all gets rather flabby. The lurid sexuality which pervades the prurient sketches of ‘permissiveness’ – a skirt never quite covers an arse, breasts always seem to be forcing themselves out of dresses – offers a few moments of interest, although they pale in comparison with the teeming, obsessive visions of Ronald Searle, whose angular lines the 1950s- works superficially resemble – and who is vastly more deserving of the exhibition’s throwing around of the term ‘genius’.
(I hadn’t heard of Lancaster before, but it’ll probably turn out that S. had a pile of his books but threw them out before moving house.)