African American Doctors

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David McBride
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Care ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Medical Schools ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Free Black ◽  
Black Physicians

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.

scholarly journals Foundations of the aspect of health care and two hundred years since the birth of Florence Nightingale 1820-1910

2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 83-90
Author(s):  
Damir Peličić
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Care ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Scientific Discipline ◽  
Nursing Profession ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
International Council ◽  
Florence Nightingale ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

Nursery has existed throughout history and it dates back to the very beginning of humankind. It was mentioned in church books and other written texts but not as a skill or science, but as an occupation reserved for the members of monastic orders, and also for women, that is, mothers, and nuns. First, nursing was an occupation, then a skill, but at the end of the 20th century, it became a scientific discipline. Florence Nightingale is certainly one of the most significant women in the history of nursing, medicine, and society in general because she is the pioneer of the nursing profession that has continuity up to nowadays. She was born on May 12, 1820, in Florence, Italy and died on August 13, 1910, in London. Florence Nightingale worked as a nurse, organizer, researcher, statistician, reformer, writer and a teacher. She reformed nursery and public health. In 1860, she established the school for nurses within St. Thomas' Hospital and she took care of every protégé. In spite of all obstacles, which she was faced with, and the unenviable position of women in the 19th century, she made a huge move that changed the context of this profession forever. She had a huge influence on the Swiss philanthropist Henry Dunant (1828-1910), who was the founder of the Red Cross. In 1867, the International Council of Nurses proclaimed that her birthday would be the International Nurses Day. She was the first woman who was awarded the Medal of virtues. In 1908, she was conferred the Order of Merit by King Edward. She wrote more than 200 books and the Pledge.

Black Women and Beauty Culture in 20th-Century America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxine Leeds Craig
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Beauty Culture ◽  
Beauty Contests ◽  
Hair Care ◽  
Black Beauty

Black beauty culture developed in the context of widespread disparagement of black men and women in images produced by whites, and black women’s exclusion from mainstream cultural institutions, such as beauty contests, which defined beauty standards on a national scale. Though mainstream media rarely represented black women as beautiful, black women’s beauty was valued within black communities. Moreover many black women used cosmetics, hair products and styling, and clothing to meet their communities’ standards for feminine appearance. At the beginning of the 20th century, the black press, which included newspapers, general magazines, and women’s magazines, showcased the beauty of black women. As early as the 1890s, black communities organized beauty contests that celebrated black women’s beauty and served as fora for debating definitions of black beauty. Still, generally, but not always, the black press and black women’s beauty pageants favored women with lighter skin tones, and many cosmetics firms that marketed to black women sold skin lighteners. The favoring of light skin was nonetheless debated and contested within black communities, especially during periods of heightened black political activism. In the 1910s and 1920s and later in the 1960s and 1970s, social movements fostered critiques of black aesthetics and beauty practices deemed Eurocentric. One focus of criticism was the widespread black practice of hair straightening—a critique that has produced an enduring association between hairstyles perceived as natural and racial pride. In the last decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, African migration and the transnational dissemination of information via the internet contributed to a creative proliferation of African American hairstyles. While such styles display hair textures associated with African American hair, and are celebrated as natural hairstyles, they generally require the use of hair products and may incorporate synthetic hair extensions. Beauty culture provided an important vehicle for African American entrepreneurship at a time when racial discrimination barred black women from other opportunities and most national cosmetics companies ignored black women. Black women’s beauty-culture business activities included beauticians who provided hair care in home settings and the extremely successful nationwide and international brand of hair- and skin-care products developed in the first two decades of the 20th century by Madam C. J. Walker. Hair-care shops provided important places for sharing information and community organizing. By the end of the 20th century, a few black-owned hair-care and cosmetics companies achieved broad markets and substantial profitability, but most declined or disappeared as they faced increased competition from or were purchased by larger white-owned corporations.

Agriculture and Agricultural Labor

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Douglas Hurt
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
World War I ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Agricultural Labor ◽  
The South ◽  
Farm Work

The agricultural and farm labor history of African Americans extends across more than four centuries, from slavery beginning in the early 17th century to freedom resulting from the Civil War to a small number of independent farm owners by the early 21st century. Prior to the Civil War, slavery primarily served as an agricultural labor system. During the colonial period, only a few free African Americans owned land and farmed independently, but most worked in some fashion as slaves, producing tobacco and rice, tending livestock, and processing food. In 1794, Eli Whitney patented the first efficient cotton gin for processing short-staple cotton. With this invention, much of the South became a major cotton-producing region with a great need for cheap labor, which African Americans unwillingly provided. The Civil War ended slavery as an agricultural labor force, but the landless African Americans remained tied to large-scale farmers and planters as sharecroppers. In this agricultural system, sharecroppers essentially rented the land and paid the landlord with a portion of the crop, usually 50 percent, and the landlord told them how to conduct their farm work. They lived in a netherworld bound by degradation, poverty, and hopelessness. By the turn of the 20th century, more than 707,000 African American farmers remained impoverished by the crop lien and furnishing merchant system and usually farmed no more than fifty acres. They were free but their lives remained constrained by racism, which limited their access to capital for the purchase of land, machinery, livestock, seed, and fertilizer. Beginning with World War I, many African American farmers left the land for better opportunities elsewhere. By the mid-20th century, African American farmers remained impoverished because the agricultural lending programs of the federal government, particularly those of the Department of Agriculture, discriminated against them. African American farmers frequently met rejection when they applied for loans and other government assistance that would enable them to improve their agricultural activities. Most African American farmers, in the North and the South, owned too-little land to produce sufficient crops and livestock to earn a satisfactory living. The 21st century brought little change. Those who remained often held off-the-farm employment to keep their farms viable. Racism continued to color social and economic relationships with whites, credit institutions, and the federal government. Moreover, African American farmers often produced for local and specialty markets, and they chose agriculture as a lifestyle rather than as a commercial, moneymaking endeavor.

Health and Medicine

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Ward
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
African American ◽  
Medical Professionals ◽  
Howard University ◽  
American Health Care ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Physicians ◽  
Black Health ◽  
Manuscript Collections ◽  
African American Health

The medical and health care history of African Americans is a small but growing field of historical study. Much of the research done on the subject in the early 20th century was conducted by black medical professionals themselves. John Kenney, Booker T. Washington’s personal physician, authored one of the very first studies of black medical professionals, The Negro in Medicine, in 1912, while other a number of other black physicians, including Midian O. Bousfield and Paul Cornely, authored numerous books and articles on the black medical experience in the early and mid-20th century. The field was, in many ways, founded by the legendary Howard University Medical School Professor Dr. W. Montague Cobb, who, while not a historian by training, was among the first to chronicle the contributions of black physicians, hospitals, and medical schools in his articles for the Journal of the National Medical Association (the black counterpart to the Journal of the American Medical Association) and for the NAACP’s The Crisis. Perhaps the single most important activist in the struggle for integration in the medical profession, Cobb’s writings provide invaluable insights into the fight for the desegregation of hospitals, professional associations, and medical schools. Finally, Cobb was central in collecting and assembling the papers of prominent black physicians, and, due to his efforts, Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center houses the most significant manuscript collections regarding African-American health care and medicine. In addition to Howard University, important manuscript collections regarding black health care are housed at the Amistad Center at Tulane University, at Meharry Medical College Archives, and at Fisk University’s Special Collections. Not surprisingly, the focus of most historians of black healthcare has been on issues of slavery, including Todd L. Savitt’s classic work Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia (1981) and Deidre Cooper Owens’ Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology, as well as studies that focused on racial discrimination in the American health care system, such as Edward H. Beardsley’s, A History of Neglect (1987) and Thomas J. Ward’s Black Physicians in the Jim Crow South (2003). The Tuskegee syphilis study has been one of the few African-American healthcare topics that has received wide attention, most famously in James Jones’s Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (1984, 1993), and increasingly there has been more attention paid to issues regarding the impact that government policies have played in black health, including David Barton Smith’s Health Care Divided: Race and Healing a Nation (1999) and David McBride’s Caring for Equality: A History of African American Health and Health Care (2018).

scholarly journals Children in the Syrian Civil War: the Familial, Educational, and Public Health Impact of Ongoing Violence

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 874-882 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdallah Mohamed Elsafti ◽  
Gerlant van Berlaer ◽  
Mohammad Al Safadi ◽  
Michel Debacker ◽  
Ronald Buyl ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Health Care Providers ◽  
Life Quality ◽  
Health State ◽  
Care Providers ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Syrian Civil War ◽  
The Impact

AbstractObjectiveThe Syrian civil war since 2011 has led to one of the most complex humanitarian emergencies in history. The objective of this study was to document the impact of the conflict on the familial, educational, and public health state of Syrian children.MethodsA cross-sectional observational study was conducted in May 2015. Health care workers visited families with a prospectively designed data sheet in 4 Northern Syrian governorates.ResultsThe 1001 children included in this study originated from Aleppo (41%), Idleb (36%), Hamah (15%), and Lattakia (8%). The children’s median age was 6 years (range, 0-15 years; interquartile range, 3-11 years), and 61% were boys. Almost 20% of the children were internally displaced, and 5% had deceased or missing parents. Children lacked access to safe drinking water (15%), appropriate sanitation (23%), healthy nutrition (16%), and pediatric health care providers (64%). Vaccination was inadequate in 72%. More than half of school-aged children had no access to education. Children in Idleb and Lattakia were at greater risk of having unmet public health needs. Younger children were at greater risk of having an incomplete vaccination state.ConclusionsAfter 4 years of civil war in Syria, children have lost parents, live in substandard life quality circumstances, and are at risk for outbreaks because of worsening vaccination states and insufficient availability of health care providers. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2016;10:874–882)

Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Landscape Features ◽  
Fugitive Slaves ◽  
Free Black ◽  
African American Communities

This enlightening study employs the tools of archaeology to uncover a new historical perspective on the Underground Railroad. Unlike previous histories of the Underground Railroad, which have focused on frightened fugitive slaves and their benevolent abolitionist accomplices, this book focuses instead on free African American communities, the crucial help they provided to individuals fleeing slavery, and the terrain where those flights to freedom occurred. This book foregrounds several small, rural hamlets on the treacherous southern edge of the free North in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. It demonstrates how landscape features such as waterways, iron forges, and caves played a key role in the conduct and effectiveness of the Underground Railroad. Rich in oral histories, maps, memoirs, and archaeological investigations, this examination of the “geography of resistance” tells the new, powerful, and inspiring story of African Americans ensuring their own liberation in the midst of oppression.

Jim Crow laws of the 1890s and the origins of New Orleans jazz: correction of an error

Popular Music ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerah Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Musical Tradition ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
Louisiana Purchase ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Free People ◽  
New Orleans Jazz

A seriously misleading error has crept into almost all the literature on the origins of New Orleans jazz. The error mistakenly attributes to the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s a significant role in the formation of the city's jazz tradition.Jazz historians have done a reasonably good job of depicting the two black communities that existed in new Orleans from the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 until the twentieth century. One community comprised a French-speaking Catholic group who lived mostly in downtown New Orleans, i.e. the area of the city down-river from Canal Street. Before the Civil War this group, commonly called Creoles, or Black Creoles, but more accurately called Franco-Africans, comprised free people of colour as well as slaves, and after the war consisted of their descendants who perpetuated the group's language, religion and musical tradition, which combined French, African and Caribbean elements.Members of the other black community were English-speaking Protestants who lived mostly in uptown new Orleans. That group, before the Civil War, was made up largely of slaves brought to New Orleans by Americans who flooded into Louisiana after the 1803 Purchase, though it also included some free people of colour. After the war, the descendants of these immigrants continued their language, religion and musical tradition, which came mostly from the rural South. There Anglo-Africans were generally less prosperous and less educated than the downtown Franco-African or Creole community.

scholarly journals The Health Systems of Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Public Health ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Mills
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Health System ◽  
Political Science ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Health Systems ◽  
Middle Income ◽  
Middle Income Countries ◽  
Low And Middle Income

“Health system” is a term generally considered to be relatively recent. It is defined as all organizations, institutions, and resources that produce actions whose primary purpose is to improve health, whether these be targeted at individuals (such as health-care delivery) or populations (such as public health measures). Health-care and public health institutions have a long history, but the notion of an organized “health system” is a relatively recent development (dating from the mid-20th century). In low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), Western medicine was often introduced by former colonial authorities through the construction of public hospitals, health centers, and training schools, with church authorities also making a major contribution. As in high-income countries, there was a gradual process over the latter half 20th century to construct an organized and coordinated national health system. However, health systems became a key focus of international attention only in the late 1990s, when it became apparent that achieving the health-related Millennium Development Goals (e.g., reduction of child and maternal mortality; control of HIV, TB, and malaria) was threatened less by the availability of technical solutions and more by the ability of health systems to put them into practice. More recently, the Ebola epidemic in West Africa highlighted the critical importance of health systems in ensuring health security. In response to the increased awareness of the role of health systems, significant attention has been paid to defining the health system and its goals, categorizing its elements, assessing problems and testing solutions, and seeking to identify the relationship between different health system configurations and overall performance. Over time, specific issues within the general area of health systems have received special attention, including achieving universal health coverage (where the whole population of a country has access to health care and protection against its costs), the role of primary health care, the relative merits of different ways of financing a health system, the relative roles of public and private health sectors, and the appropriate mix of different types of health worker. Many disciplines can contribute to improved understanding of health systems, including economics, sociology, anthropology, history, political science, and management science. Until recently, the discipline of economics has tended to dominate the study of health systems. However, with the emergence of health policy and systems research as an important area of study, other disciplines have been making growing contributions, especially political science and the behavioral sciences concerned with the behavior of both individuals and organizations.

scholarly journals African-American and Latina Women Seeking Public Health Services: Cultural Beliefs regarding Pregnancy, including Medication-taking Behavior

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Luz Dalia Sanchez ◽  
Joie Rowles ◽  
David Dube
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Care ◽  
African American ◽  
Health Services ◽  
Cultural Beliefs ◽  
Care Providers ◽  
Latina Women ◽  
Public Health Services ◽  
Life Style Changes ◽  
Medication Taking Behavior

Objective: to describe cultural beliefs and medication-taking-behavior about pregnancy in African-American and Latina women. Design: qualitative study using phenomenological methodology; face-to-face, semi structured interviews and focus group. Thematic analysis was done to obtain themes consistent with the research objective. Setting: Maricopa County, Arizona, Department of Public-health Programs, November 2008 through April 2009. Participants: women seeking public-health services in the greater Phoenix, Arizona. Results: fifteen adult women representing two ethnic groups (seven African-Americans and eight Latinas) participated. Themes derived from the interview data included: "The Dilemma: To Become or Not to Become Pregnant;" "The Ideal Stress-free World: Support System;" "Changing Worlds: Wanting Dependency;" and "The Health care System: Disconnection from Pregnancy to Postpartum." Conclusions: based on the cultural themes: 1. pregnancies were not planned; 2. healthy life-style changes were not likely to occur during pregnancy; 3. basic facts about the biology of sexual intercourse and pregnancy were not understood, and there was no usage of any preconceptional or prenatal medications; and 4. professional health care was not desired or considered necessary (except during delivery). These cultural beliefs can contribute to negative birth outcomes, and need to be considered by pharmacists and other health-care providers. The information gained from this study can guide the implementation of educational programs developed by pharmacists that are more sensitive to the cultural beliefs and points of view of these particular women. Such programs would thus be more likely to be favorably received and utilized. Type: Original Research

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