History of Black Americans and Health Care in Massachusetts

Annotated Multimedia Bibliography of Resources since the Founding of the Massachusetts Medical Society in 1781

MMS Committee on History, October 2023

• Overview

• Medical History Society Websites

• 18th Century

• 19th Century

  • Rebecca Davis Lee Crumpler, MD

  • John Van Surly DeGrasse, MD

  • Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, MD

  • Mary Eliza Mahoney

• 20th Century

  • Solomon Carter Fuller, MD

  • William Augustus Hinton, MD

  • Cornelius Nathaniel Garland, MD

  • Jessie Gideon Garnet, MS

• Contemporary — Early 21st Century

Overview

• A History of the Massachusetts Medical Society, 1781–1922, by Walter L. Burrage, AM, MD, Secretary of the [Massachusetts Medical] Society. Norwood, MA, The Plimpton Press, 1923. 505 pages.

  Mentions the Civil War but neither slavery nor race. Available in full-text online at google.com/books.

• Race and Medicine Collection, New England Journal of Medicine. Available at https://www.nejm.org/race-and-medicine.

  “The Race and Medicine collection reflects NEJM’s commitment to understanding and combating racism as a public health and human rights crisis. Our commitment to antiracism includes efforts to educate the medical community about systemic racism, to support physicians and aspiring physicians who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color, and ultimately to improve the care and lives of patients who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color.”

• Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, by Harriet A. Washington, MA, New York, Anchor Books, 2006. 501 pages.

  This publication is readable, well-documented, and deeply disturbing. For example: Crawford Long experimented with ether on enslaved people prior to Morton’s demonstration at MGH [Massachusetts General Hospital] in 1846, memorialized in the famous painting owned by the Boston Medical Library. The author is a bioethicist at Columbia University. Interviews of the author can be found on YouTube.

• An American Health Dilemma: Race, Medicine, and Health Care in the United States (vol 1: Beginnings to 1900; vol 2: 1900–2000), by W. Michael Byrd, MD, and Linda A. Clayton, MD. New York, Routledge, 2000 and 2002. 588 and 854 pages.

  The authors practiced Ob-Gyn at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital. Includes history of scientific racism, from Galen to Linnaeus, phrenology to eugenics. This resource is scholarly and encyclopedic.

• An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Volume 1 and Volume 2, by Gunnar Myrdal, 1944, 1962.

• Health Progress in the United States 1900–1960 in The Health of Non-White Population, Chapter 12 by Monroe Lerner and Odin W. Anderson.

  Syllabus: A History of Anti-Black Racism in Medicine by Antoine S. Johnson, Elise A. Mitchell, Ayah Nuriddin. Available at https://www.aaihs.org/syllabus-a-history-of-anti-black-racism-in-medicine/.

• Black Heritage Trail, Boston, MA, National Park Service. Available at https://www.nps.gov/boaf/virtual-black-heritage-trail-tour.htm.

• The Historical Roots of Racial Disparities in American Health Care presents “The Color of Care.” Available at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/historical-roots-racial-disparities-american-health-care-180979800/.

  A 2022 documentary from the Smithsonian Channel that focuses on the inequities in medical care experienced by African Americans currently and throughout our history.

• American Medical Association: “The History of African Americans and Organized Medicine.” Available at https://www.ama-assn.org/about/ama-history/history-african-americans-and-organized-medicine.

• “African American Physicians and Organized Medicine, 1846–1968: Origins of a Racial Divide.” Baker R, Washington H, Olakanmi O, et al. Available at https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/182255.

  “Achieving Racial Harmony for the Benefit of Patients and Communities: Contrition, Reconciliation, and Collaboration.” Davis R. Available at https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/182232.

• National Medical Association: “History.” Available at https://www.nmanet.org/page/History.

• National Dental Association: “About NDA.” Available at https://ndaonline.org/about-nda/.

• National Black Nurses Association, Inc. Available at https://www.nbna.org/.

• “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Healthcare: A Background and History,” by W. Michael Byrd, MD, MPH, and Linda A. Clayton, MD, MPH (pp. 455–527), in Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care, 2003, National Academies Press. Available at https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/12875/unequal-treatment-confronting-racial-and-ethnic-disparities-in-health-care.

Medical History Society Websites

• More information on medical history societies is available at https://artsci.case.edu/dittrick/research/links-of-interest/medical-history-societies-and-associations/.

Additional pages:

• 18th Century

• 19th Century

• 20th Century

• Contemporary — Early 21st Century