Physicians for the People
Physicians for the People
Black Doctors and the Struggle for Health-Care Equality in Alabama, 1870–1970
A comprehensive historical account of race and healthcare in the segregated South
Physicians for the People chronicles the remarkable stories of 241 Black doctors who practiced medicine in Alabama during the Jim Crow era. Historian Jack D. Ellis reveals the ingenuity and resilience of these trailblazing doctors who defied segregation by establishing hospitals and clinics and providing vital healthcare to underserved Black communities.
This meticulously researched work draws on archival sources, oral histories, and an unparalleled database to dismantle the myth of a monolithic medical system in the Jim Crow South. Jack D. Ellis argues that the post–Civil War lives of Black physicians, dentists, pharmacists, nurses, and midwives hold special significance, illuminating both the causes of health care disparities among African Americans and the reasons for their continued underrepresentation in the medical professions.
Offering much of interest to students and scholars of Black history, medical history, and the civil rights movement, Physicians for the People exposes the deliberate exclusion faced by Black doctors within the white medical establishment and their ongoing fight for racial equality in medicine.
An important contribution to the field of African American healthcare history, which, while growing, is still in many ways in its infancy. The extensive oral histories alone make this a valuable contribution to the field, but Dr. Ellis has gone much further than just tying the oral histories together; he has placed them in a larger historical narrative.’ —Thomas J. Ward, author of Black Physicians in the Jim Crow South, 1880–1960
List of Illustrations and Maps
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations and Acronyms
Chapter 1. Tuskegee's Public Health Crusade, 1881–1970
Chapter 2. Becoming Doctors
Chapter 3. Physicians to the Poor
Chapter 4. Birmingham's Black Doctors Fight for a Hospital of Their Own, 1930–1954
Chapter 5. Civil Rights, Professional Rights
Chapter 6. An Unfinished Revolution
Appendix: Select List of Black Hospitals in Alabama, 1890–1960
Notes
Bibliography
Beside the Troubled Waters
A Black Doctor Remembers Life, Medicine, and Civil Rights in an Alabama Town
To Raise Up the Man Farthest Down
Tuskegee University’s Advancements in Human Health, 1881–1987
By Dana R. Chandler and Edith Powell; Foreword by Linda Kenney Miller
The Defoliation of America
Agent Orange Chemicals, Citizens, and Protests
By Amy Marie Hay; Foreword by Mark D. Hersey
