African American Doctors

Throughout history African American doctors have been held in high esteem in the culture and political affairs of Black America. Reflecting the major phases of black American history, the literature on black doctors reveals black medical leaders are seen as an elite because they have promoted simultaneously improving their professional status and the plight of the black race pursuing national equality. The first body of writings covers the slavery era, Civil War and Reconstruction, and the so-called Nadir through the early 20th century. This literature asserts folk medicine practitioners, along with indigenous midwives helped to hold slave and free black communities together. As proprietary medical schools sprouted up throughout the antebellum North, a few blacks managed to gain apprenticeships or attend medical schools and then finally became practicing doctors. Like other trained physicians of this era, black doctors promoted their practices and medicines as entrepreneurs throughout the free black communities. Early black physicians were also abolitionists and enthusiastically supported the health-care efforts of the federal government during the Civil War and Reconstruction. A second body of writings focuses on the black doctor from the start of the 20th century through World War II. They cover leading black physicians who, with the support of white professional and philanthropic allies, struggled to accommodate the segregated or, that is, “Jim Crow” health-care institutions. In the South, segregation laws and customs barred blacks from treatment in mainstream hospitals as well as black physicians from using these hospitals. In health-care facilities Jim Crow practices included separate, less-equipped wards for black patients and few privileges for black doctors and nurses to serve in these facilities. Nonetheless, black medical professionals and civic activists built independent hospitals, medical schools, and public health campaigns. Black physicians, surgeons, and nurse leaders inspired the black community’s collective esteem, public health initiatives, and political elevation. A third stream of publications emerged concerning black medical students and doctors involved in the civil rights movement. These black doctors played major roles locally and nationally to integrate medical schools, hospitals, and health agencies. A fourth body of writings developed in the last two decades of the 20th century and early 21st century. These published works center on the struggle by blacks to overcome personal handicaps and become exemplary professionals. These writings also focus on black doctors and the urban black health crisis, as well as black medical life in a new highly technological medical system The final stream of contemporary books on black doctors involve those who became national figures in the nation’s attempt to reform medical education and policies. These doctors became prominent in the face of persistent racial health disparities as well as other national health problems such as inadequate family health care and mass disasters like Hurricane Katrina.