Segregated Medicine

From Howard University's Graduating Class of 1900, courtesy Library of Congress

Though white doctors sometimes had a poor education and few skills, they did not face the discrimination that African-Americans trying to enter the medical field did. In the U.S., black medical students generally went to missionary schools or proprietary schools (owned by doctors who were paid through student fees), or to schools in Canada. Even the few northern schools in the U.S. that would accept black students typically treated them shabbily. Black physicians did not have admitting privileges to hospitals, and because of this, many black patients preferred white doctors.

Many black medical students attended Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, D.C., established in 1868. It was named for Major General Oliver O. Howard, a Civil War officer who was helped found the university and who was the commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau. (Howard University received much of its financial backing from this agency.) Whites controlled most aspects of the university; it did not have a black president (Dr. Mordecai Wyatt Johnson) until 1926. However, Dr. Alexander Thomas Augusta, a free-born African-American from Virginia who attended Trinity Medical College in Toronto, was among the university’s founding staff. He was the first African-American to serve on a medical school faculty in the U.S.

Dr. Daniel Hale Williams (1856-1931) founded Provident Hospital and Training School for Nurses (Chicago) in 1891; it was the first black owned and operated hospital in the United States. He also founded the National Medical Association in 1895, after black doctors were excluded from the older American Medical Association. This organization was originally known as the National Negro Medical Association.