The 1st. 17 years of my life. Dr. Lewis Stokes lived next door. Dr. Stokes was a pioneering Black physician active in the NAACP. Black PHYSICIANS ARE STILL RARE. NEW BOOK "Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons With Racism in Medicine.”

 My next-door neighbors for the first 17 years of my life were Dr. Lewis Stokes and his wife Ms. Barbara Stokes. 

Dr. Stokes was a pioneering Black physician who was active in the NAACP. 

My parents called on Dr. Stokes when I had medical emergencies at night. I went to his office on Chestnut Street in Coatesville. I don't know what he put in those big syringes. I got better quickly when I saw him. 

Cutting through my Black neighbors yards on my way to school where I had Black and White friends it was hard to be racist. 

FROM:

Tuesday, April 4, 2023

Living in an antisemitic forest trees etched with swastikas go unnoticed. It seems hate and love can be felt in our bodies, somehow transmitted in the air. In the antisemitic forest Democrats are assumed Jewish. Your body feels the hate.

The U.S. medical industry got around the shortage of physicians because of racial discrimination in U.S.medical schools by accepting foreign physicians. 

"For centuries in this country, White-only medical schools, with exclusionary policies and practices, made it virtually impossible for Black people to receive medical training. It was only after the Civil War, with thousands of injured veterans in desperate need of medical care, that a small handful of Black trainees began to be admitted to White medical schools in the North. And it wasn’t until Reconstruction that a number of Black medical schools sprang up in the South, enabling Black people to finally have access to medical training in greater numbers.

These schools were Howard University College of Medicine, established in D.C. in 1868; Meharry Medical College, established in Nashville in 1876; Leonard Medical School, established in Raleigh, N.C., in 1882; New Orleans University Medical College, founded in 1887; Knoxville College Medical Department, founded in 1895; Chattanooga National Medical College, founded in 1902; and the University of West Tennessee College of Physicians and Surgeons, founded in Memphis in 1904. By 1905, those Black medical schools had trained 1,465 doctors. Each of those doctors was poised to train a new generation of physicians, who would have gone on to train a generation of their own.

And then, that promising legacy was abruptly extinguished.

The reason was the publication of the Flexner Report — a landmark document in U.S. medical history that had a devastating effect on the number of Black physicians in this country.

Abraham Flexner, the White author of the report, was an education specialist who at the turn of the 20th century was employed by the Carnegie Foundation and the American Medical Association to travel to all 155 medical schools in the United States and Canada to assess the state of medical education. His report, published in 1910, led to broad standardization of medical schools, with the top school in the country at the time — Johns Hopkins — held up as the example for all others to follow.

The new standards did go some way toward elevating the quality of U.S. medical care. Flexner’s recommendations included more-stringent admissions criteria; well-equipped laboratories and facilities; and a higher level of instruction by physician scientists, resembling the model found in Western European medical schools. The problem was that smaller Black institutions simply did not have the resources or endowments to implement the more rigorous instruction the new standards required.

Flexner had strongly racist opinions on the role of Black people in medicine. He wrote that Black students should be trained in “hygiene rather than surgery” and were best employed as “sanitarians” who could help protect White people from common diseases such as tuberculosis.

“Not only does the negro himself suffer from hookworm and tuberculosis; he communicates them to his white neighbors,” Flexner wrote, begrudgingly admitting that Black people did need some role in health care, if mostly as it pertained to Whites. “The negro must be educated not only for his sake, but for ours. He is, as far as the human eye can see, a permanent factor in the nation.” He added that Black medical schools were “wasting small sums annually and sending out undisciplined men, whose lack of real training is covered up by the imposing M.D. degree.”

After the Flexner Report, five of the seven Black medical schools in the United States were forced to close, leaving only Howard and Meharry.

Almost a hundred years later, in June 2020, amid a global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, I read an article about the Flexner Report that popped up in my Twitter feed. My heart dropped as my eyes scanned the information. I wasn’t prepared for its contents.

The article described a new study estimating that if the majority of Black medical schools had been allowed to remain open after the Flexner Report’s publication, and if they had continued training Black doctors to this day, they would have educated roughly 25,000 to 35,000 people. In essence, tens of thousands of future Black physicians had disappeared. I remember sobbing as I absorbed the magnitude of those numbers.

The loss of so many Black physicians to the field of medicine and to our communities has been undeniably profound. We know — as I witnessed in my mother’s clinic — that racial concordance in patient-physician interactions influences everything from how patients feel when they leave their appointment to how likely they are to take their medications. We know that because Black physicians are more likely to mentor and sponsor Black students, those students would have felt more comfortable, and would have been more likely to thrive, in academic medical environments, resulting in greater academic success and career opportunities — and generations of new doctors.

We know that had those Black medical schools remained open, the health of our communities might be in a different place, most likely better than it is today.

Instead, more than a century after the Flexner Report, we are still recovering from its impact. In 1900, 1.3 percent of U.S. physicians were Black, when Black people made up 11.6 percent of the population. Today, the number of Black physicians remains stubbornly low, with only 5.7 percent of all U.S. physicians identifying as Black — although Black people make up 13.6 percent of the population."

MORE AT THE WASHINGTON POST:

You can listen to Uché Blackstock reading this excerpt AT:

The Washington Post

Opinion How tens of thousands of Black U.S. doctors simply vanished

By Uché Blackstock

January 22, 2024 at 7:00 a.m. EST

The U.S. medical industry got around the shortage of physicians because of racial discrimination in U.S.medical schools by accepting foreign physicians. 

I had a Black surgeon but he was from Nigeria. He would be murdered if he went back to Nigeria. 

“An international medical graduate (IMG), earlier known as a foreign medical graduate (FMG), is a physician who has graduated from a medical school outside of the country where he or she intends to practice. The term non-local medical graduate may be similarly used in countries with distinct licensing regions within them.[1][2] Generally, the medical school of graduation is one listed in the World Directory of Medical Schools (WDOM) as accredited by the Foundation for Advancement of International Medical Education and Research or the World Health Organization.

Medical schools around the world vary in education standards, curricula, and evaluation methods. Many countries have their own certification program, equivalent to the ECFMG in the United States. The purpose of ECFMG Certification is to assess the readiness of international medical graduates to enter clinical specialty training programs as resident physicians and fellowship programs in the United States.”

FROM:

International medical graduate