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).

African American Health Care

JAMA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 289 (3) ◽  
pp. 360
Author(s):  
Brian C. Reed
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
African American ◽  
American Health Care ◽  
African American Health

To Make the Wounded Whole

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Royles
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Drug Users ◽  
Medical Professionals ◽  
Nation Of Islam ◽  
Black America ◽  
Black Feminists ◽  
Aids Activism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global Work ◽  
Hiv Aids

In the decades since it was identified in 1981, HIV/AIDS has devastated African American communities. Members of those communities mobilized to fight the epidemic and its consequences from the beginning of the AIDS activist movement. They struggled not only to overcome the stigma and denial surrounding a “white gay disease” in Black America, but also to bring resources to struggling communities that were often dismissed as too “hard to reach.” To Make the Wounded Whole offers the first history of African American AIDS activism in all of its depth and breadth. Dan Royles introduces a diverse constellation of activists, including medical professionals, Black gay intellectuals, church pastors, Nation of Islam leaders, recovering drug users, and Black feminists who pursued a wide array of grassroots approaches to slow the epidemic's spread and address its impacts. Through interlinked stories from Philadelphia and Atlanta to South Africa and back again, Royles documents the diverse, creative, and global work of African American activists in the decades-long battle against HIV/AIDS.

scholarly journals Afrocentricity as the Organizing Principle for African Renaissance. Interview with Prof. Molefi Kete Asante, Temple University (USA)

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 210-217
Author(s):  
Aaron X. Smith
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
Florida State University ◽  
State University ◽  
Temple University ◽  
African Renaissance ◽  
Howard University ◽  
History Of ◽  
Distinguished Scholar ◽  
The University

Professor Molefi Kete Asante is Professor and Chair of the Department of Africology at Temple University. Asante’s research has focused on the re-centering of African thinking and African people in narratives of historical experiences that provide opportunities for agency. As the most published African American scholars and one of the most prolific and influential writers in the African world, Asante is the leading theorist on Afrocentricity. His numerous works, over 85 books, and hundreds of articles, attest to his singular place in the discipline of African American Studies. His major works, An Afrocentric Manifesto [Asante 2007a], The History of Africa [Asante 2007b], The Afrocentric Idea [Asante 1998], The African Pyramids of Knowledge [Asante 2015], Erasing Racism: The Survival of the American Nation [Asante 2009], As I Run Toward Africa [Asante 2011], Facing South to Africa [Asante 2014], and Revolutionary Pedagogy [Asante 2017], have become rich sources for countless scholars to probe for both theory and content. His recent award as National Communication Association (NCA) Distinguished Scholar placed him in the elite company of the best thinkers in the field of communication. In African Studies he is usually cited as the major proponent of Afrocentricity which the NCA said in its announcing of his Distinguished Scholar award was “a spectacular achievement”. Molefi Kete Asante is interviewed because of his recognized position as the major proponent of Afrocentricity and the most consistent theorist in relationship to creating Africological pathways such as institutes, research centers, departments, journals, conference and workshop programs, and academic mentoring opportunities. Asante has mentored over 100 students, some of whom are among the principal administrators in the field of Africology. Asante is professor of Africology at Temple University and has taught at the University of California, State University of New York, Howard University, Purdue University, Florida State University, as well as held special appointments at the University of South Africa, Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, and Ibadan University in Nigeria.

History of Modern Medicine

2015 ◽  
pp. 28-43
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
History Of Medicine ◽  
Medical Practice ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Medical Professionals ◽  
History Of

The purpose of this chapter is to understand the problems in health care today, and the need to trace the history of medicine to its roots. Methods of evolution of medical practice have a lot to say about how training of medical professionals must be carried out. The history of medicine is both fascinating in scope yet elementary in application. In other words, medicine has always been about the patient and no one but the patient.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 309-314
Author(s):  
Martin Summers
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Mentally Ill ◽  
Health It ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Orthodox View

The conclusion provides a summation of the book’s main arguments and offers suggestions for further research in the history of African American mental health. It reasserts the two central theses. First, Saint Elizabeths’ psychiatrists’ construction and reaffirmation of the white psyche as the norm produced a great deal of ambiguity regarding the nature of black insanity. This contributed to the prioritizing of the white sufferer of mental illness and the marginalization of mentally ill blacks. Second, African American patients and their communities exercised agency in their interactions with Saint Elizabeths, both to shape the therapeutic experience and to assert their status as citizens. This latter argument suggests that the orthodox view that African Americans have generally had an indifferent or antagonistic relationship to psychiatry needs to be rethought, which will require further historical scholarship, particularly with respect to African American activism within the realm of mental health care.

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document