At the end of WW 2, American medical schools were anxious to return to a more normal admissions policy. The military’s policy of choosing students solely on their science training and potential for a military career had elicited substantial disapproval among civilian medical educators, who sought substantial changes in the postwar period. As AAMC President Stanley Dorst, noted in 1954, academic medicine should remember that “the ultimate goal of all education is not technical competence, not accumulated knowledge, but the development of wisdom.” Current trends in preparation for medicine threatened to “replac[e] a learned profession with a multitude of highly competitive, closely organized guilds. “

The history of medical school admissions in the post-WW2 period probes assumptions about the nature of science and its ability to support political and social assumptions about the racialized and gendered profile of “the American character.” Picking the “right” student body was crucial for American medical schools, as physicians were part of the scientific professional class, and the Cold War climate mandated that scientific professionals were expected to not only heal the sick and prevent disease, but also to provide an intellectual bulwark against the “Soviet threat.” Naturally, these postwar studies employed the methodology of science--one based on “systematic theory,” specifically psychology and “the newer social sciences,” relying heavily on theories of personality. Merit should be determined scientifically, with the “mature personality” counting as much as intelligence.

This narrative for this paper shows that civilians, not the military, who drove wider-spread use of social science methodology among the civilian population in the 1950s. Between 1950 and 1970, the AAMC’s new social science office used the tools of personality psychology to produce massive numbers of studies to assess the ideal candidate for medical school. Cold War beliefs in the efficacy of science research had a significant impact of how they parlayed their findings to establish admissions policies. The use of personality and other standardized tests created a scientific rationale for a profile that supported gendered and racialized profiles for medical school admissions that changed only decades later.