Armstrong – Table of Contents

School was also the first to afford its students the opportunity to further their training in
an affiliated teaching hospital. “Modern American medical education started at Hopkins
over a century ago when the founding physicians of the Johns Hopkins University School
of Medicine created a revolutionary medical curriculum that, for the first time, integrated
a rigorous program of basic science education with intensive clinical mentoring” (4). The
founding physicians were the “Famous Four” who provided the core of the outstanding
early clinical faculty. They were Sir William Osler, Professor of Medicine, Dr. W.S.
Halsted, Professor of Surgery, Dr. William H. Welch, Professor of Bacteriology and
Pathology, and Dr. Howard A. Kelly, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology. In 1910,
when Abraham Flexner, the American education reformer, wrote Bulletin #4, Medical
Education in the United States and Canada exposing the inadequacies of most
proprietary schools for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, he
endorsed the Johns Hopkins model of medical education (4). Subsequently the American
Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges laid down
standards for course content, qualifications of teachers, laboratory facilities, affiliation
with teaching hospitals, and the licensing of physicians that survive to this day (5).
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine accepted Charles Armstrong for admission in
the fall of 1911, and he entered his studies with enthusiasm. At the end of his freshman
year he returned home to Alliance, and he was determined to continue his medical studies
without interruption. He was able to do this by working summers. The first summer he
worked with a railroad construction gang digging trolley post-holes. Thereafter, he
secured more lucrative employment in a foundry assembling railroad car couplers. This
was heavy work but he had always been used to hard work on the family farm. The