• DOI:10.1098/rsbm.1949.0006
• Corpus ID: 159733258

Simon Flexner, 1863-1946

@article{Rous1949SimonF1,
  title={Simon Flexner, 1863-1946},
  author={Francis Peyton Rous},
  journal={Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society},
  year={1949},
  volume={6},
  pages={408 - 445}
}

• F. Rous
• Published 1 November 1949
• History
• Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society

If Simon Flexner had been asked to classify himself, beyond doubt he would have deemed his place to lie amongst the most factual of men; for always he concerned himself with immediate situations and his logic was severe. He had no use for prophecy, and visionaries he could not understand. Yet he had vision of the sharpest, seeing the future implicit in the present; and he acted upon what he saw. From youth, as if with foreknowledge, he made himself ready for the needs of a coming time, moulding himself for its purposes, almost in detail. Flexner derived from an erudite Jewish family who were living in Bohemia when his father, then a boy, was sent off for education to an uncle, a rabbi in Strasbourg. There Morris Flexner grew up and for a brief while taught school before emigrating to the United States in 1853. Landing in New York he pressed on to New Orleans with two companions, to find opportunities in the French quarter; but instead they were found by yellow fever and within a few weeks Flexner alone was left alive. He lost no time in making his way up the Ohio River to the good climate of Kentucky, already a well-settled state, as the occupation he perforce took up sufficiently shows; for he became a peddler, tramping from house to house. Soon he was providing wares to other peddlers, and within a few years had become a merchant in hats at wholesale and was able to marry. His wife had grown up in Alsace and learnt dressmaking in Paris before journeying to relatives in Louisville, where she and Morris Flexner now set up their home. They both had been soundly taught by the world, possessed enterprise and acumen, and were familiar with the languages and ways of France and Germany. Simon was born in 1863, the fourth of nine children. The panic of 1873 wiped out his father’s business, and his parents almost gave over the hope to educate their children for the professions. It is a measure of their despair that one day Simon’s father, downcast and silent, led him by the hand to the neighbourhood plumber and offered him as apprentice. But so meagre was the ten-year boy that the plumber after one glance said no. This was ‘S. F.’s’ own story, told long after at an august dinner in his honour, to relieve an occasion which bore on him hard.