The Man Who Ruined American Healthcare

John D. Rockefeller

Prior to 1910, the practice of medicine in the United States left a great deal to be desired. Some medical degrees could be purchased through the mail and many others could be obtained with marginal training at understaffed and inadequate medical schools. The profession was suffering from a bad public reputation and reform was in the air.

John D. Rockefeller and his associates were making a concerted effort to control the entire field of medicine in America. During the 1890s, Rockefeller interests in medical education and "scientific medicine" were spearheaded by Frederick T. Gates, John D. Rockefeller's investment manager. 1901 saw the founding of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research with $60,000,000 to "advance and disseminate knowledge of the nature, causes, treatment and prevention of disease."  1902, Rockefeller's General Education Board was founded with a mission to annihilate the causes of racial discords. This agenda was clarified two years later with the publication of John D. Rockefeller's Occasional Letter No. 1 in which he detailed his plans to mold Americans to his concept of "perfect human nature." This, he claimed, might best be accomplished by destroying parental influence, traditions and customs, while reducing national intelligence levels.

Who were Rockefeller's "associates"? 

The Rockefeller clan had a powerful control over the Bush ancestors.  Samuel Prescott Bush (grandfather to George Herbert Walker Bush and great-grandfather to George Walker Bush) was employed by John D Rockefeller's brother Frank at Buckeye Steel Castings Company.  Sam Bush succeeded as president of Buckeye when Frank Rockefeller retired. Sam Bush was also director of William Rockerfeller's interests in the Pennsysvania Railroad, and was enlisted to aid Percy Rockefeller's Remington Arms get more government business during WWI. Sam Bush's son Prescott Sheldon Bush was an eugenicist on record, lost his first election attempt as Connecticut senator when it was revealed that he was Treasurer of Planned Parenthood in Connecticut. As usual Bush lied about his past. This collection is assembled just to demonstrate John D. Rockefeller's ties to theRockefeller Institute for Medical Research eugenics mentality. Step by step the story becomes clear about supporting mass murder willfully, deliberately, intentionally, knowingly.

In 1902, J.D. Rockefeller and Averell Harriman, a business partner of Prescott Bushand George Herbert Walker in Brown Brothers Harriman, gave $11 million to create the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Built on Manhattan property owned by the Dulles brothers, it spawned America’s ground-breaking “eugenics” research and the world’s first “racial hygiene” laws. 

In 1904, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (home to today's Human Genome Project) was built on the estates of John Foster and Allen Dulles, lawyers for the Rockefeller Standard Oil Company.   To help bring about a higher-paid profession, the AMA in 1904 created the Council on Medical Education, which sought to shut down more than half the existing medical schools by rating them on a scale of A to C. In cooperation with State medical boards composed of what Arthur Dean Boran, head of the council, called the "right sort of men," the AMA succeeded in cutting the number of schools to 131 by 1910, from a high of 166. By 1907, Rockefeller funding was heavily influencing America’s medical institutions. The Rockefeller Institute created the first genetics lab in 1909. The following year, the Eugenics Research Association and the Eugenics Records Office were founded near Cold Spring Harbor, New York, on land donated by the widow of Averell Harriman. In 1911, John Foster Dulles summed up eugenics, saying that by eliminating “the weakest members of the population” a purer race could be created.  

The Dulles Brothers, who openly professed John D. Rockefeller's racial hygiene doctrines, later directed the. US military's Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and after World War II, the CIA. Charles B. Davenport constructed the Cold Spring Harbor facility to provide a home for racial hygiene research, what was then called "eugenics research." The first racial hygiene laws in the world evolved from investigations and reports issued from here. The John D. Rockefeller and Averell Harriman, America's wealthiest oil and railroad magnates, invested more than $11 million-an extraordinary fortune at that time-in funding this facility. Soon thereafter, in 1909, the first genetics laboratory was established at the Rockefeller Institute and directed by Dr. Phoebus Aaron Theodor Levene.

By 1907, medical education had been mostly monopolized by the Rockefeller consortium. That year, the American Medical Association (AMA) advanced its medical education rating system effectively eliminating, by 1918, approximately 600 of the initial 650 medical schools. 

Henry S. Pritchett, the president of the Carnegie Foundation, approached the AMA and simply offered to take over the entire project. The minutes for the meeting of the AMA's Council on Medical Education held in New York in December of 1908 tell the story:

At one o'clock an informal conference was held with President Pritchett and Mr. Abraham Flexner of the Carnegie Foundation. Mr. Pritchett had already expressed by correspondence the willingness of the Foundation to cooperate with the Council in investigating the medical schools. He now explained that the Foundation was to investigate all the professions: law, medicine, and theology  . . .

He agreed with the opinion previously expressed by the members of the Council that while the Foundation would be guided very largely by the Council's investigation, to avoid the usual claims of partiality no more mention should be made in the report of the Council than any other source of information. The report would therefore be, and have the weight of, a disinterested body, which would then be published far and wide. It would do much to develop public opinion.

Here was the classical "philanthropic formula" at work again. Have others pay a major portion of the bill (the AMA had already done most of the work. The total Carnegie investment was only $ 10,000), reap a large bonus from public opinion (isn't it wonderful that these men are taking an interest in upgrading medical education!), and gain an opportunity to control a large and vital sphere of American life.

This is how that control came about.

The Flexner Report, as it was called, was published in 1910. As anticipated, it was "published far and wide," and it did "do much to develop public opinion." The report quite correctly pointed out the inadequacies of medical education at the time. No one could take exception with that. It also proposed a wide range of sweeping changes, most of which were entirely sound. No one could take exception with those, either. The alert researcher will note, however, the recommendations emphatically included the strengthening of courses in pharmacology and the addition of research departments at all "qualified" medical schools.

After Abraham Flexner completed his report, he became one of the three most influential men in American medicine. The other two were his brother, Dr. Simon Flexner of the Rockefeller Institute and Dr. William Welch of Johns Hopkins Medical School and of the Rockefeller Institute. According to Hinsey, these men, acting as "a triumvirate":

. . .were not only involved in the awarding of grants for the Rockefeller Foundation, but they were counselors to heads of institutions, to lay board members, to members of staffs of medical schools and universities in the United States and abroad. They served as sounding boards, as stimulators of ideas and programs, as mediators in situations of difficulty. 

The foundations captured control of the apex of the pyramid of medical education when they were able to place their own people onto the boards of the various schools and into key administrative positions. The middle of the pyramid was secured by the Association of American Medical Colleges which set standards and unified the curricula. The base of the pyramid, however, was not consolidated until they finally were able to select the teachers themselves. Consequently, a major portion of foundation activity always has been directed toward what generally is called "academic medicine." Since 1913, the foundations have completely preempted this field. The Commonwealth Fund reports a half a million dollars in one year alone appropriated for this purpose, while the Rockefeller Foundation boasts of over twenty thousand fellowships and scholarships for the training of medical instructors.

And so it has come to pass that the teaching staffs of all our medical schools are a very special breed. In the selection and training process, heavy emphasis always has been put on finding individuals who, because of temperament or special interest, have been attracted by the field of research, and especially by research in pharmacology. This has resulted in loading the staffs of our medical schools with men and women who, by preference and by training, are ideal propagators of the drug-oriented science that has come to dominate American medicine. And the irony of it is that neither they nor their students are even remotely aware that they are products of a rigid selection process geared to hidden commercial objectives. So thorough is their insulation from this fact that, even when exposed to the obvious truth, very few are capable of accepting it, for to do so would be a tremendous blow to their professional pride.

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