Physicians for the People

Black Doctors and the Struggle for Health-Care Equality in Alabama, 1870–1970

• Author(s): Jack D. Ellis,
• Publisher: University of Alabama Press
• Pages: 243
• ISBN_10: 0817361863
  ISBN_13: 9780817361860
  
• Language: en
• Categories: History / General , History / United States / State & Local / South (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV) , History / African American & Black , Medical / History , Social Science / Race & Ethnic Relations ,

Description:... "African Americans have always fared worse than whites in enjoying the benefits of material progress and medical discovery. Black sociologist and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois argued that high mortality rates among Black people were rooted not in racial inferiority but in "the conditions of life," a fact illustrated by tuberculosis, which was three times higher among Blacks than whites, as well as the infant mortality rate for nonwhite children, which was 149.7 deaths per 1,000 births as opposed to 92.8 per 1,000 for white children. In "Physicians for the People: Black Doctors and the Struggle for Health-Care Equality in Alabama, 1870-1970," Jack D. Ellis argues that the post-Civil War lives of Black physicians, dentists, pharmacists, nurses, and midwives hold special significance in this regard, illuminating both the causes of health care disparities among African Americans and the reasons for their continued underrepresentation in the medical professions. At the center of Ellis's study are African American doctors who practiced in Alabama between the late 1870s and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. During those years, a total of 241 Black medical graduates passed their licensing examinations and opened offices in the state. Ellis poses these questions: What were their geographical and family origins, and why had they been attracted to the study of medicine? Where had they trained, and how did they manage to function as professionals in a climate of racial oppression? What was their relationship to white doctors practicing in their communities, and how did they compensate for their systematic exclusion from local medical societies and hospitals? To identify Alabama's Black doctors of the past, Ellis first turns to the annual membership lists of each medical society in the state's sixty-seven counties, where the names of licensed practitioners who were not members also appeared, followed by the abbreviation "col." (for "colored"), a routine practice of the era that only ceased in 1965. Ellis then compiles oral histories from various interviews with physicians, dentists, and family members who were able to provide information on conditions affecting African-American medical practice in Alabama between the 1930s and 1970s. Portions of these oral histories include doctors' recollections of childhood, family life, and early education, and their evolving interest in the sciences, which occurred despite the weakness of libraries and laboratories in Black schools. Also included are the doctors' memories of medical training and the problems they encountered once in practice, from the wholesale poverty of their patients to the parallel worlds in which Black and white practitioners pursued their calling, as well as their accounts of the years spent trying to gain admission to Alabama's county medical societies, where membership was required to be admitted to hospital staffs and to pursue specialty training. As Ellis shows, this proved to be the hardest battle of all, even though Black doctors had passed the same licensing examinations as white doctors. From their first appearance in Alabama, Black physicians hoped to cooperate with their white peers, but their efforts went largely ignored; white doctors tended not only to share the racist norms of their time but often exceeded them. Black doctors being denied hospital training came at an enormous price to their careers and to the health of the state's Black citizens, the effects of which can still be seen today in statistical data, which shows that Black doctors face a disproportionate number of sanctions when compared to white physicians, and that the maternal and infant mortality rates for Black women and children are still much higher than their white counterparts"--