Visiting Research Scholars

Master’s Student, Department of History of Science and Medicine, Yale University 

Flexner’s modus vivendi in the state of New York: the transformation of Cornell’s medical education through partnership with Bellevue Hospital from 1900-1950

With a primary interest in 20th century US medical education, this project will grapple with Abraham Flexner’s modus vivendi, an idea proposed in his seminal report of 1910 to reduce the overwhelming and destructive competition among New York City-based medical institutions in the early 20th century. At the institutional level, I will place (Weill) Cornell Medical College at the nexus of my project, aiming to outline the multifarious impacts that transformed the clinical years of undergraduate and graduate medical education at this specific medical institution. It is here I will focus on a direct product of Flexner’s modus vivendi––a relationship that was formally established between Weill Cornell Medical College and Bellevue Hospital in the early 1910s. Through this multifaceted relationship, I hope to uncover the inter-institutional dynamics between Cornell and Bellevue’s medical faculty, staff, and students, attempting to answer the question: did Flexner’s modus vivendi ultimately improve students’ learning or impede it? By leveraging the primary accounts, materials, and activities of Dr. Connie Guion, Dr. Philip Reichert, Dean Niles, and Dean Polk at the Medical Center Archives of New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medicine, I hope to illuminate Cornell’s unique modus vivendi-ridden history of medical education, a concept that remains to be a paramount pillar of modern US medical education.

Carolyn Eastman, PhD

Professor, Department of History, Virginia Commonwealth University 

A Plague in New York City: How the City Confronted—and Survived—the Yellow Fever Epidemic in the Founding Era 

I will spend a week with some of the oldest materials in the Medical Center Archives, relating to the establishment of the New York Hospital in 1771 and its management after the Revolution, including the hiring of a mixed-race staff of nurses and other employees. I study that period for a very specific reason: to understand how the city hospital responded to the ongoing and increasing threat of yellow fever during the 1790s and into the early 1800s, and the roles of Black and white care workers in facing the epidemics that hit the city several times. Ultimately, I seek to show that the hospital's and the city's response to these epidemics changed the nature of the city at this crucial moment in urban development.