Johns Hopkins medical school adopted the German educational structure in the late 19th century in an attempt to establish itself as a beacon of evidence-based medicine and science
US medicine in the 19th century lacked standardization. So in the late nineteenth century, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore was trying to reform itself with rigor into a beacon of evidence-based medicine and science, by adopting the German hierarchical learning pedagogy. At the top of each lab there was Herr Professor, and everyone else was an underling and therefore expendable (Rockefeller University adopted the same organizational structure).
References
- Lustig, Robert. (2021). Metabolical Chapter 6. Because Big Pharma Was Their Teacher (p. 114). New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.