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).
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