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ABSTRACT Milton Winternitz led Yale Medical School as its Dean from 1920 to 1935. An innovative, even maverick leader, he not only kept the school from going under, but turned it into a first-class research institution. Dedicated to the new scientific medicine established in Germany, he was equally fervent about "social medicine" and the study of humans in their culture and environment. He established the "Yale System" of teaching, with few lectures and fewer exams, and strengthened the full-time faculty system; he also created the graduate-level Yale School of Nursing and the Psychiatry Department, built numerous new buildings, and much more. It is a loss to 21st-century medicine that his dream of an Institute of Human Relations, envisioned as a refuge where social scientists would collaborate with biological scientists in a holistic study of humankind, lasted for only a few years, before falling victim to the more obvious triumphs of medical science and technology. It is sad, too, that he is remembered largely as a Jew presiding over a medical school that, like most others, restricted the number of Jewish students, rather than for his contributions to American medicine.
THE RISE AND FALL OF MILTON WINTERNITZ (1885-1959), Dean of the Yale School of Medicine from 1920 to 1935, might seem largely a local matter, of interest only to those with Yale connections, were it not for its implications for a wider medical public in the 21st century. Just as each generation needs to rehearse its ethical quandaries, the lessons of the past are rarely so parochial as to bear no repeating. Winternitz's career at Yale provides an example of hubris, the overweening pride that leads to a fall. His conflict with the faculty he himself had chosen sounds a warning for the much-praised mentor relationship, a relationship that sometimes leads young investigators to carry the old on their shoulders far too long: seniors must sooner or later yield with grace and gratitude to those whom they have helped up the greasy pole. Winternitz's accomplishments, especially the Yale System, endure, but there are no buildings in his honor, and only one prize-which is wrongly credited in the 2001 Medical School Bulletin as being in the name of "C. Winternitz." Furthermore, his acceptance of the all-too-common...