Health Sciences Library Virtual Displays

A memoir by an African American physician in Alabama whose story in many ways typifies the lives and careers of black doctors in the south during the segregationist era.

Between its founding in 1966 and its formal end in 1980, the Black Panther Party blazed a distinctive trail in American political culture. The Black Panthers are most often remembered for their revolutionary rhetoric and militant action. Here Alondra Nelson deftly recovers an indispensable but lesser-known aspect of the organization's broader struggle for social justice: health care.

The service of African Americans in defense of the Union during the Civil War required African American nurses, doctors and surgeons to heal those soldiers. In the nation's capital, these brave healthcare workers created a medical infrastructure for African Americans by African Americans. Preeminent surgeon Alexander T. Augusta fought discrimination, visited President Lincoln, testified before Congress and aided the war effort. Washington's Freedmen's Hospital was formed to serve the District's growing free African American population, eventually becoming the Howard University Medical Center. These physicians would form the National Medical Association, the largest and oldest organization representing African American doctors and patients. Author Heather M. Butts recounts the heroic lives and work of Washington's African American medical community during the Civil War.

This book examines the development of medical sciences in postcolonial Kenya, through the adventures and stories of the controversial Kalenjin scientist Davy Kiprotich Koech. As a collaborative life story project, it privileges African voices and retellings, re-centering the voice of African scientists from the peripheries of storytelling about science, global health research collaborations, national politics, international geopolitical alliances, and medical research.

Examines the the evolution of medicine and ophthalmology in the African American community.

Race, Ethnicity and Health, Second Edition, is a critical selection of hallmark articles that address health disparities in America. It effectively documents the need for equal treatment and equal health status for minorities. Intended as a resource for faculty and students in public health as well as the social sciences, it will be also be valuable to public health administrators and frontline staff who serve diverse racial and ethnic populations. The book brings together the best peer reviewed research literature from the leading scholars and faculty in this growing field, providing a historical and political context for the study of health, race, and ethnicity, with key findings on disparities in access, use, and quality. This volume also examines the role of health care providers in health disparities and discusses the issue of matching patients and doctors by race. New chapters cover: reflections on demographic changes in the US based on the current census; metrics and nomenclature for disparities; theories of genetic basis for disparities; the built environment; residential segregation; environmental health; occupational health; health disparities in integrated communities; Latino health; Asian populations; stress and health; physician/patient relationships; hospital treatment of minorities; the slavery hypertension hypothesis; geographic disparities; and intervention design.  

At times mirroring and at times shockingly disparate to the rise of traditional white American medicine, the history of African-American health care is a story of traditional healers; root doctors; granny midwives; underappreciated and overworked African-American physicians; scrupulous and unscrupulous white doctors and scientists; governmental support and neglect; epidemics; and poverty.

An examination of the medical experiences of African Americans During the days of slavery in America, racism and often-faulty medical theories contributed to an atmosphere in which African Americans were seen as chattel: some white physicians claimed that African Americans had physiological and anatomical differences that made them well suited for slavery. These attitudes continued into the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras. In Race and Medicine historian Todd Savitt presents revised and updated versions of his seminal essays on the medical history of African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in the South. This collection examines a variety of aspects of African American medical history, including health and illnesses, medical experimentation, early medical schools and medical professionals, and slave life insurance. Savitt examines the history of sickle-cell anemia and identifies the first two patients with the disease noted in medical literature.