Abraham Flexner's contributions to the University of Iowa's College of Medicine, September 26, 2013

- [Donna Hirst] I would like to welcome you to the History of Medicine Society at the University of Iowa. This is our first meeting of the fall semester, and I think we have a very interesting, exciting year planned, so I hope you can come to a number of the lectures this year. If you would like to be on the mailing list for the History of Medicine Society, there's a sign up sheet at the back. You just have to put your name and email address, and I'll add you. And we've got like 400 people on the list. It's not a very high traffic list, so feel free to sign up if you would like to get notices about the talks and other related things. So I have the pleasure of introducing Stan Thompson, a very interesting man. He was born in China to Irish missionary parents, and he spent World War II in a Japanese concentration camp in North China. He returned home to Belfast, Ireland, after the war and immigrated to the United States in 1949. He earned his B.A., and after becoming a U.S. citizen, he went to medical school at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Thompson was drawn to Iowa by the reputation of the ophthalmology department, and he began an ophthalmology residency in 1962. He spent 1962 to 1976 doing research and teaching and was promoted to professor in 1976. He retired in 1997 after 30 years of service to the University College of Medicine. Stan Thompson has a substantial antiquarian book shop located in an addition to their house outside Iowa City. They welcome browsers who call ahead, and the email address is books@ginniff.com. I'm sure Stan would explain why the website address has that name. His areas of interest include history of medicine, science and technology, and other things. Dr. Thompson's quiet manner and his research curiosity make him an ideal person to speak to us about Abraham Flexner's contribution to the University of Iowa's College of Medicine. So, thank you. - [Dr. Stan Thompson] As Donna says, I did come here to intern in 1961, and the first thing I noticed other than the football game going on was that there was a huge medical center, a surprisingly big hospital. And I, you know, wondered about that because here's an agricultural state in a small college town and cornfields in every direction. And what is such a big hospital doing here? Well, it had a very interesting history. This slide is really a title slide because we've already had a talk in this group about Philo Farnsworth and also I can tell you that Dr. Hinrichs there in chemistry, he had a paranoid streak and finally was canned by the president of the university. If you looked at him cross eyed, he wrote letters to the newspaper about you. Well, so Flexner was one of the causes of this being a big medical center. And so I don't need to tell you anything else about these guys. I don't think they all lived in Iowa City, you know. There was one of them, I'm not sure if it was one of these, that actually practiced in Sioux City, and took the overnight train on Thursday night, a good night's sleep, I think, and operated here on Fridays, and then went home for the weekend. Well at any rate, and of course, as I think most of you know, I won't dwell on this, a lot of times when the medical school really didn't have a decent building, and there was one, I think it was after the fire of the new building, that they had to work in this little place, which had been originally built to train mechanics or something, before Ames took over, I think, and they managed to get, with the help of the Sisters of Mercy, to get 20 beds into this building, and but it was a bit of a struggle. And of course the Sisters of Mercy helped here too, because they had a barn, I mean this is obviously a barn, which, it was a carriage house I guess, and it was about big enough so that they could get the graduation photo, and that's what's going on there. But, I got some of these pictures from Donna. This bridge was called the Centennial Bridge, and I don't know how long it was there, but it was there apparently before the 1900s, but that big one up there is, I don't have a pointer but that's okay, was the medical building, it was called. It was the College of Medicine. It had labs and offices and whatnot in it, and that was, they got the money for that in 1880. It was built and finished and occupied by mid 1880s, and the building just to the north of that is called South Hall, 'cause it was south of the old capitol. And that's a much older building from the 1860s. You can see they hadn't invented central heating yet, because every room had a chimney. A bridge in that other one, by the way. I don't know if that goes back. No, I'll just proceed. That bridge was replaced in 1916 by the Iowa Avenue Bridge, and it was pointed a little more straight down than this one. But on the other side of the bridge it was the University of Iowa football field here in the foreground, and there are the same two buildings that I mentioned up there. The medical school and South Hall. I'm not sure about the hall, the building they moved bodily across Jefferson Street, but that doesn't affect us. Now so where these three buildings, on the crest of the Pentacrest, it didn't have the five buildings yet. The old capitol, and then there is South Hall and the medical school. Now there are only about 20 feet in between these two buildings. And there was about a hundred feet between these two. If you, the date was March the 10th, 1901, and there were a bunch of students who had got permission to talk about some project they were gonna do on the campus in the evening, in one of the conference rooms there, and they bailed out at about 10 o'clock, and they were started to build Shaeffer Hall right here. It doesn't show it in this picture because this precedes it, but that was close too, about 15, 20 feet, and they came out of here, and they went out to the street and started up towards the coffee shop, but on the way, they noticed that there was a light in the window in the medical building, and they looked up there and they saw, convinced themselves it was a flame. So they ran up the hill and had somebody call the fire department. Well it took them awhile to get there, what with their horses and their pipes and hoses and pumps, and when they got there, they probably had some difficulty getting water that high, because it was at least the third floor, and so the thing got away from them, and the medical building started collapsing, and this whole building lit up. And this was a major disaster, because that was the big advance of the medical college, that new building. And there's a picture somebody took from the street here, east-west street. And this was the medical building. The top floor is already gone, and South Hall with all the windows is lit up and caving in, as you can see. So everything crumbled. They ended up, let me see what else I got here. There you can see that, a couple weeks later when they started tearing it down, you can see the old capitol through there. It was not damaged. And that's the old Centennial Bridge, Iowa Avenue, and what you can see in this picture. I wish I had a pointer. You see, over the curves there, there's substantial buildings in the background on the horizon, light-colored buildings. That's Schaeffer Hall, which was just almost finished at the time of the fire, and now you can see it, because the buildings have come down, so this was after 1900, and this bridge was replaced. And just to clue you in about something familiar, here is a current aerial shot showing the Pentacrest, and this space right here is where South Hall and the Medical Center were, right in between those, and of course, I can't point to it, but there is Calvin Hall right across Jefferson, and it was moved right across the street to make room for the symmetric set of buildings on the Pentacrest. That was a little story. I'd like to hear somebody tell me the details of how they did that, without crumbling any red bricks out of it. - [Narrator] Show your Iowa pride. The Iowa Hawk Shop, where Iowa shops. The ultimate collection of Iowa Hawkeye merchandise, gifts, and apparel. Help support the University of Iowa. All proceeds benefit men's and women's athletic teams and student programs. The Iowa Hawk Shop, where Iowa shops. Show your Iowa pride. Call 1-800-HAWKSHOP, or visit http://www.hawkshop.com. - [Dr. Stan Thompson] So they had to start building that new hospital, and this is what's left these days of the hospital that was built on Iowa Avenue. It was, there is the main piece, and there were two pieces here and here, and the tower, two towers. And they chopped off this bit in order to build Spence Labs. Now I'll show you that. This is about how it looked in 1909, when Flexner came to visit. I have to tell you about him, but here is, this is a few years later, and this would be a F.W. Kent picture, I think. Because he loved messing with old cars, and if you look carefully, you can see somebody in there, standing there, and I think he's put his wife in there to pose, as a gag, 'cause he knew nobody'd be able to see her. So I need to talk to you about Flexners. This is the family, and they lived in Louisville, Kentucky, and both the patriarch and his wife came from Germany to Louisville. I mean they ended up in Louisville. They weren't setting out to go to Louisville, but that's where they ended up, and they met at a synagogue there, and married. And they had these nine kids, seven boys and two girls. And the oldest one, Jacob, he was a leader in this lot. He felt that since his father was getting a little too much brandy in him, that he was gonna have to take over the decision making, and there he sat at the old man's right hand. And so he had only salesman's skills, and she made small money as a seamstress, so there wasn't any big income. And that was frustrating, because this is a family that valued education a lot, and you needed money to get an education. So this is Abraham Flexner, and this is his brother Simon Flexner, who probably became more famous because he became the director of the Rockefeller Institute in New York, and was there for life, it must have been, another 25, 30 years. And so Abraham was a bright lad, and his oldest brother, Jacob, who started working in a drug store, and then he ended up buying a drug store near the hospital, and there were a lot of doctors who'd come in, and he'd talk stuff with them. He loved to talk medicine, argue with them about why they didn't do it this way, you know. But he finally was making some money in the drug store, and he saved up 2,000 dollars, and he said to his kid brother, Abraham, I've got the money for you to go to Johns Hopkins and get a bachelor's degree. I mean, he was only 17, Abe, at the time, and so off he went. Well of course, well, not of course, but it so happened that what with room and board and tuition and what not, 2,000 didn't cover four years. It covered about two years. So Abraham Flexner's response was, I can get it all in in two years. So, for example, in his first term he was taking a course in Greek. He always wanted to be able to read Greek, and what he did was he came to the class, and he watched for a few days, and the students didn't know any Greek either, and they didn't really want to learn, and it was a lot of chitchat and throwing stuff around, and a little bit of homework, and not much progress by the next two days, so he went to the professor and said, I would like to learn Greek. I would like to take your course, but this is going too slow for me. I'd like to learn it faster. If you give me something, test my level of my Greek right now, and I'll come back and you can test me again, and at the end of the course you can test me again, and as many times as you want, and if you think I've passed, then would you give me the credit for this course. And the professor said, okay. And so he went home and he got a bag, and he got a lot of little slips of paper, and he wrote, say a Greek verb on one side, and the translation on the other, and different forms of the verb, and different, until he got a big vocabulary. There were little chips of paper stuck in his bag, and then he pulled it out, and the one side of the paper was green, and the other wasn't. So he'd look at the green side and read, try to read it, and if he knew what it meant, he would turn it over, and if he was right he'd put it in another bag. And if he was wrong, he put it back in, shuffle it up, and take another one out. And so he just taught himself vocabulary, and when he had questions he talked to the professor. At the end of the course, he was doing very well, and got credit. Well, he must have done this over and over to finish in two years. But that's what he did, and got a B.A. from Johns Hopkins. He really didn't want to go into medicine. His concept of what a doctor does just didn't sound very interesting to him. So, he was very interested in education. He started in fact a high school in Louisville. It was a private high school. He charged money, and he taught them well. And he had several people apply to major colleges like Bryn Mawr and got in, and so it was successful, and he was able to support the family a little bit with some of his income from that. But education is the theme of his life, and he was working in New York for various people with ideas, and one of them was the Carnegie Company, and the people who made use of Carnegie's philanthropic money. And so they got interested in, because they were always talking about medical education, and deploring some terrible medical schools that were there, and, you know, the kind that got a bunch of farm boys in, gave 'em a course of lectures for six weeks, and sent 'em home for Christmas and New Year's, and then gave 'em another set of lectures in January and February, and by the time to put the crops in, they had to go again, you see, and they got an M.D. out of that, after their name, you see. So, once he got the Carnegie people interested in this, it was clear that nobody really knew what medical education was like in detail in this country, and what was required was that somebody go around and interview all the medical schools. It seems impossible, and would be I think impossible now, but it wasn't quite as many then, and so he set out, and it was a heroic job because they had to go chugalug on the train and get off, get your stuff together, and sometimes you had to find a place to stay and talk to the right people, but he finally got it well organized, and when it was time to come to Iowa City, what he did was he telegrammed in advance to the president of the university, McClain, and he said he was going to be arriving from St. Louis at 6 p.m., and could somebody, you know, pick him up, take him to the University Hospital? And where he was going to look around and ask some questions. And he said, I plan to catch the midnight train to Omaha, you see, so he had only six hours in town. And actually President McClain personally picked him up, because wind of this is coming around, and he wanted to make his place look good, so he treated him well, and he took him to the University Hospital on Iowa Avenue there, and they talked to the hospital administrator, and he asked a bunch of questions, and he wanted to see the hospital charts of its patients. Well, they said, we don't have any charts. The doctor who admitted them took them in his briefcase, you know. He keeps them in his office. And, which is not a good sign, and then he asked, what about teaching rounds for medical students? Well, you know the answer to that. If there are no charts there, it's hard to do teaching rounds, because you're not quite connected with every patient. So, this was, it didn't look good, and there were only a handful of doctors in Iowa City. It was a small town. And so his recommendation, sort of summary, was Iowa City is just too small a town to support a medical college, and you just don't have enough doctors in practice here. And so one solution he suggested was just close up your medical school, send your would-be doctors to Chicago or Minneapolis or something. - [Narrator] What difference does tradition make? In 125 years, the University of Iowa College of Pharmacy has come to symbolize unsurpassed education and training, the highest quality patient care, the pursuit of new knowledge through discovery, the quest to enhance human health, a foundation of excellence for the challenges of tomorrow. The University of Iowa College of Pharmacy, celebrating the past, shaping the future. - [Dr. Stan Thompson] That didn't go down well at all, of course. This was a real poke in the eye for the whole state, because it was a state college of medicine at the state university, and so on, so he went home when he'd made his whirlwind tour, and he wrote this all up, and it was published by the Carnegie people in one of their journals, just by July. It was only about six months from the end of his tour till it came out. Well it caused a sensation, because everyone had doubts, but no knowledge about what medical education was like, and many medical colleges of borderline quality were indeed closed. In fact, in Iowa, there was a hospital program in Keokuk, and one in Des Moines, that were closed down, partly because they were largely homeopathic still, and that was a no no for Flexner. He didn't believe in belief-based medicine. It's biology, science, knowledge, and you don't come to it with a pre-organized belief. Well, or course, the state university of Iowa had no intention of closing down their medical school, and so what to do? Well, this is where, oh there he is, as a young man. I forgot to show you the slides. That was just before he graduated from college. This is the guy I want. He ran an insurance business. He taught a high school too, just like Flexner, and from the insurance company, he went to work in a bank, and he was a banker the rest of his life in Cedar Rapids. In other words, he's dealing with money, and so he was tapped to serve on the Iowa Board of Regents. It was called the Iowa Board of Education at the time, and there he served and ended up being the chairman of the finance committee. In other words, here's a guy whose side job is money for the university and so on, and so he was natural that he took an interest when Flexner's report came out. So he looked at the report, and he telephoned New York and got Flexner's office and made an appointment to talk to him. And then he got on a train and went two days to New York to talk to him. And the strange thing is that Flexner was a famously difficult person to get along with. He was often cranky, and he was usually quicker at figuring things out and getting things done than most people, and he didn't have the patience for the rest of us. So but he went there and talked to him, and basically he said, all right, so we haven't got the greatest medical school in Iowa that we would like to have, and I'd like to be able to do something about it. I can't give any great gifts, but I could help organize a campaign to raise some money for a new medical building and so on for the medical school. And Flexner's reaction was, no no no. That's too small. You've gotta go big. If you're gonna build something new, of course he had Hopkins in mind, you see. You gotta have a great, any modern medical college, he said, should be just part of something that's much bigger, like a major medical research center, and up-to-date pathology and radiology and bacteriology, and all this new stuff. And it should all be located in the same area, so that the medical student can learn from all directions. And I'm not sure that he actually said that he might be able to raise some money some day, but I think that was the hint. He was working with Carnegie, who was famous for contributing to the construction of at that time over a thousand municipal libraries already, and but it was, I think there probably was a hint someplace there that he might be able to get up a little philanthropic money to perhaps as matching dollars for what Iowa could come up with, or something like that. Well, the trouble was, this was 1910, and soon there was world war, and this and that going on, and nothing much was happening, but these two men strangely kept in touch. I really admire this man for being able to stay on the sweet side of Abraham Flexner, such as it was, and they never seemed to have had a serious argument. Boyd wanted to get enough money to build a decent medical center in Iowa City, and Flexner had the capability and the will, really, to try to raise the money. It wasn't something that anything would think about, because it was apparently a busy decade, but somehow they kept in touch, and people who knew Flexner in New York marvel at some talent that Boyd had for being able to keep this working friendship up. And he was very patient, you know, waited for a decade before anything happened. And so here we have two guys. He's still head of the finance committee for the Board of Regents, all right, and it's his position to try and be the person you'd ask if you tried to get some money raised for this purpose, and Flexner was a man who could keep right there in his head an amazing collection of facts and arguments and so on that were needed to persuade the philanthropic people. Well, a decade went by, and I don't know the details of what connection they had during that time, but in 1920, Flexner came to Iowa City to do his homework for preparing a plea to philanthropic agencies for the necessary money, and so the first thing he said was, I mean he not only visited Boyd, but he visited President Jessup at the time, too, and talked about it, and they said, well, I can't start raising money until I know how much I gotta raise, so that means, I think it's your responsibility, the university, he said, to hire an architect to make an estimate. I'm not asking anybody to build anything yet, but if we were to build a 700-bed hospital and all of this and all of that, all around it, then what do you think it would cost? So, they made this estimate, and it took 'em a little while thinking about it. Eventually their estimate was four and a half million dollars. Well, you know, a dollar was more at that time than it is now, and in Iowa it might be even more, so it was sort of a stunning number, but the next year, Flexner set about trying to raise some money in New York. And he went to what's called the General Education Board. This was various philanthropic sources like Rockefellers and Carnegies and others. They didn't wanna hassle with everybody who had their bright idea, take the time to listen to them, you see. Even though they did have money that they wanted to give to good causes, so they depended on an outfit, like they did their own talking sometimes, but most of the applications went through the GEB, as they called it, General Education Board. That is the applicants that had something to do with education. This was a board of maybe 8 or 10 people who listened to a sales pitch of various kinds, saying this is a wonderful cause. Look what we could do if we had this and that, and what we need is this money, and convince them that that was a good cause, and would be a wonderful thing for the world and everything, and then they would take that saying, top of our list to the Rockefellers, let's say, is this, and we got also this and this, so the trouble was, at the time, 1921, the guy who was president of the GEB, that is the guy who was running the show and preparing the stuff to take to the money people, he had a thing about not wanting to spend philanthropic money to help an outfit that was tax-payer supported. Just didn't seem right to him, and I mean Flexner I'm sure tried to point out all the good that this was gonna do. Who cares who's paying for the university? We're gonna do something that's going to do a lot of extra good, and just think about that. But the, I don't know the name of the guy who was president of the board, who made this fuss, but they refused. And so what he did within the two or three months, was he got an appointment with the Rockefeller board, that is the Rockefellers themselves might look favorably on this, even though the board that they had set up to handle this wasn't gonna do it. So, and he made this application directly to the Rockefeller Foundation, and they said, okay, we'll give 25%. That's 1,125,000 dollars. So then in November of '22 then, all this takes time, he went back to the GEB, the General Education Board, and said, look, Rockefellers think this is fine, and they're giving that amount. Why don't you give that amount too? Just an eight of the, a quarter of the whole project? So he talked them into it. Maybe the president of the GEB had retired or something. I don't know. But at any rate, he got a promise of 50% of the four and a half million, all of it offered as matching dollars for anything the state of Iowa could provide, no straight gifts. But it really was an astonishingly generous gift, and quite a lot of time in 1922 was spent in Iowa persuading the legislature to cough up a similar astronomical amount. And just to build a state university quote way over there in the east part of the state. And apparently Republicans throughout the state still thought of Iowa City in Johnson County as some kind of a sinkhole of social and political degeneracy, you know. Probably because they were mostly Democrats, and, in fact, Johnson County had always voted Democrat, and they also remembered that back in 1893, when the state of Iowa had trouble figuring out their liquor laws. You know, they made every county decide whether they would be a dry or a wet county, and Johnson County was the only county in this area that was wet, which in part, and they were still holding that against them a little bit, but the, it was a great benefit of course to Johnson County, because people from all the surrounding counties come to buy their liquor, and why they're at it, buy clothes and cars and things. So the other factor was that 1922 turned out to be a really good year for farmers, and, get this, the price of corn went up from 48 cents a bushel to 76 cents a bushel. I mean that's a big rise. And this might have persuaded some farmers, you know, to believe that they might manage after all, even though their crazy state is gonna build this extravagant hospital way over there in Johnson County. So, there was, as you know, a lot of talk about how to get people to it, and that's when we got the cars, and bringing kids in and taking them back home and everything. So the transportation was kind of part of this package. - Tradition. - Ambition. - Exploration. - Inspiration. - [Narrator] You feel it when you step on campus at the University of Iowa. - The energy and pride of students inspired by our history... - And excited about our future. - When you join the Hawkeye family, you're a part of it all. - Be a part of it. - Be a part of it. - Be apart of it. - Be a Hawkeye. - [Dr. Stan Thompson] So they got half the money from the legislature, and that brought as much again, and they started to build in the spring of '26, I guess it was. There's Flexner but this was after this, it was in his, it was about that age. So here's a picture of construction starting on the University Hospital, and I'm pretty sure that this is the back string where the wards went out, and that that's looking west. If that's the case, then they were already building Kinnick Stadium out there at the same time, same year they were working on it. And and so finally, it took two years, and in 1928, this was what they got, a sort of naked looking, now, but there it was grand, beautiful building with a great tower and a tremendous amount of medieval froufrou at the top. And everybody admired this tower, and in fact people spoke of it being a west-of-the-river sort of matching tower to the old capitol, you know. You could stand there and make code, and they'd read it in the old capitol. By this time, they'd hired a administrator for the hospital. That was Mr. Neff. Who some stories about was he did like Henry Ford. He said, no you can't use that color on the wall. You can have any of these colors. They were shades of gray. You can have these seven shades of gray. Take your pick. And I suspect he was color blind, you know, but and then they got a new dean of the college of medicine, and that was Henry Houghton, and Houghton, he had developed a reputation, I've got a picture of him someplace here, of being famously smooth and bright and effective administrator, and the Rockefeller people, you know, had made this huge investment in Peking, in China, the Peking Medical College, built beautiful new buildings, and he was the medical, he was a physician, but he was the administrator of that hospital, and then his kids got old enough to go to college, and they wanted to go to the University of Chicago, and it wasn't that far away, and guess who Abraham Flexner said to Iowa, you oughta hire that man as dean for a couple of years while he's in the country, because he's gonna go back to China, and so that was done, and he came in late 1928, about the time of the move, and to become dean of the medical college, and he was there for four year, so that's great. And so here's 1930. There's the new hospital, and it's a bit odd looking at it from it's north facing front here, because there's the tower, and this piece here, that piece there, it's just the angle. It makes it look like you could hardly get a bicycle through there, and actually the senior faculty parked in those spots. I'm gonna go back to, how do I go back? Oh, well, we can see it again sometime. The point I wanna make is that you, the architect wanted his tremendous tower to be viewed from all sides, and so he made these parking lots on either side of the tower, and the hospital was around the parking lots. But then John Cullerton said, in the mid 70s, the administrator of the hospital, we need more clinic space. We can't do this, we can't do that. Convinced everybody, and I think he was quite right. The clinic space was needed, but it didn't, his thought was, you got this great empty space here. We could fill it up with clinics, and another one on this side, see? And of course the result is that you've got buildings all the way up to about here, and you can't see the tower except from a distance or from an airplane or something. And so there was some resistance there, and Sandy Boyd was the president of the university, and he had a long interest in architecture, especially of the campus, and I think he was dragging his feet too, but when somebody got this brilliant idea, of in this surrounding building, to have the top level have glass in it. You've seen that haven't you? Well if you go up there, and as high as you can go in the tower, they've got some pieces of glass roof, and if somebody's cleaned the snow off, you can look up, and you see sort of from this angle, all that medieval glory, but right now it just looks like somebody's dumped a bunch of froufrou on the roof of the building, doesn't it? It's too bad. It's a great disappointment, because the tower is, that's part of the tower, and you don't see the tower. All you see is the decorations on the top. Oh well. And then John Cullerton, was I think finished by then, said right then, this happened while the president of the university, Willard Boyd, was the man, and his wife had worked five years in the hospital as a patient negotiator. She would, people knew that she was the wife of the president of the university, and so she could go and ask them to do this or do that for this patient, and it helped. And she'd been working at that hard for five years, and so they said, right, we're gonna name this the Boyd Tower, after Sandy Boyd and his wife. And, Susan Boyd. Well, the trouble that I have with this is that we wouldn't have this tower if it hadn't been for the efforts of another Boyd, that is, Will R. Boyd, not Willard, but Will, William R. Boyd. And he's not getting any acknowledgement for this, when they call it a Boyd Tower, everybody figures that was Sandy Boyd. He was the president of the university at the time they did that sort of thing, but, because, you know, it's pretty clear that without William Boyd's efforts with Flexner, we wouldn't have any tower at all. Or it'd be a lot plainer than the one we got. So that's, I sent this to Sandy Boyd and Susan already, and they said we really like it, but I wanted them to like it enough to say, you gotta put a plaque out there that says, this is the Boyd Tower, and here are the Boyds involved, one, two, three, you see. Because that would give some credit to William Boyd, who worked hard and long on this project, and I wanna tell you one more thing about Flexner's personality. 'Cause here's a picture of his famous, oh, that's what I should've had showing all this time while I was talking, see? And Simon Flexner, Abraham Flexner's older brother, who got this prize job, because you know the Rockefellers built huge on the upper east side there a set of research lab buildings, and he had this job for the next 35 years or something. And he did a lot of important stuff with regard to antibodies to infectious diseases, polio vaccine and some other stuff. So he when asked about his, people calling his brother a cranky SOB or something, he would say, you know, when actually he spoke about his kid brother, "He hardly ever admits to his own mistakes "or failures. "He has no difficulty "in finding fault with others," and again, "Abraham is a strong person and very generous, "intensely egotistical and with great capacity "for self deception." So, it seems in view of that, and in fact somebody's recently written a book about the bad side of Abraham Flexner. And that makes it all the more remarkable that he and Boyd were able to get along, Flexner and Boyd, and it was that getting along that resulted in us getting the medical center. Okay. That's it. - [Donna Hirst] Thank you. So does anyone have questions? - [Audience Member] Was there any resistance from the west side of the state that all this money was going to go to the east side of the state? - [Dr. Stan Thompson] Yes, I heard that voiced in one paper about this raising the money. They did think that Iowa City was way east, like they were talking about New York or something, and in fact, that started when the Iowa territory seated in the old capitol found that they were now a state, and so it was a state legislature that met here in Iowa City. Right away they got objections from the west part of the state. You mean I gotta come home-gone-away over there just to sign this paper, you know? And it was a lot of loud objections. Why aren't you in the center of the state? And so they finally said, okay, okay, we'll leave this with the university, you know, they need some buildings, and we'll, you can, how about Fort Des Moines? And it's all there was there at the time, you know, 1856 or something. There was no city there, but they said, okay, we'll put the center, legislature of the state we'll move out of this nice building and build something at Fort Des Moines, and that's the way it went. Yeah. - [Audience Member] What sort of archival depositories did you have to, what were most helpful to you in putting together this story? - [Dr. Stan Thompson] Well, the most helpful was a paper, I've written it down, by a guy who's not well now anymore, which was... I'll get to it. Here we are. By Lee Anderson. It's this sort of historian a number of years ago of university things, and he calls it "A Great Victory: "Abraham Flexner and the new medical campus "at the University of Iowa." So that's, you know, the guy I got quite a lot of this from, especially this feeling of raising money, the difficulty of raising money in 1922, and how helpful the price of corn was. It seemed to have swayed things over. So. Okay. Thanks. - [Donna Hirst] Thank you.