{"id":37713,"date":"2014-10-14T00:37:40","date_gmt":"2014-10-14T00:37:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=37713"},"modified":"2017-03-06T19:21:53","modified_gmt":"2017-03-06T19:21:53","slug":"medical-racism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=37713","title":{"rendered":"Medical Racism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Medical Racism<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2014-10-13<\/p>\n

Brent Staples<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The worst racial atrocities that took place in the Jim Crow<\/a> South were carried out by the medical establishment, not by night riders cloaked in sheets. Indeed, many more African-Americans were killed by racist medical policies than by all the lynch mobs that ever existed.<\/strong> Until the late 1960s, the American Medical Association<\/a> tacitly endorsed rules that denied membership to black physicians in the South, thus depressing their numbers in specialties such as surgery and ensuring that black patients would continue to receive dangerously substandard care \u2014 or no care at all.<\/p>\n

This subject is rarely discussed in film or on television. The director Steven Soderbergh<\/a> deserves praise for taking it up in \u201cThe Knick<\/a>,\u201d an absorbing, visually lush medical drama on Cinemax<\/a> set in New York City<\/a> at the turn of the 20th century. The show centers on the self-obsessed, drug-addicted Dr. Thackery \u2014 compellingly played by Clive Owen<\/a> \u2014 who leads a surgical team at the Knickerbocker, a hospital whose wards are awash in the immigrant poor. Known to his comrades as Thack, the junkie surgeon plans to carve his way to immortality, one bloody patient at a time, while lecturing to the rapt audience of doctors who crowd in to view his handiwork in the operating theater.<\/p>\n

A racist, he is repulsed when a wealthy hospital patron forces him to accept the services of a talented black surgeon, Dr. Algernon Edwards \u2014 Andr\u00e9 Holland<\/a> \u2014 even though Edwards has trained abroad and mastered techniques that his white betters have yet to learn…<\/p>\n

…Critics who wonder about the real-world antecedents of the Dr. Edwards character should look to Dr. Charles Drew<\/a> (1904-1950). A towering figure in medical history, Dr. Drew helped to make blood banks possible by developing efficient ways to process and store vast amounts of blood plasma<\/a>. He began his career in the 1930s when surgical residencies at white hospitals in New York \u2014 even those that treated black patients \u2014 were officially closed to black physicians. Charming and urbane, Dr. Drew wrangled what a contemporary later described as a \u201cbootleg\u201d residency at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center<\/a>, thanks to a white doctor who took an interest in him. The fact that he was light-skinned enough to be mistaken for white was clearly an asset; it made it easier for him to find acceptance with white colleagues and patients…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The worst racial atrocities that took place in the Jim Crow South were carried out by the medical establishment, not by night riders cloaked in sheets. Indeed, many more African-Americans were killed by racist medical policies than by all the lynch mobs that ever existed. Until the late 1960s, the American Medical Association tacitly endorsed rules that denied membership to black physicians in the South, thus depressing their numbers in specialties such as surgery and ensuring that black patients would continue to receive dangerously substandard care \u2014 or no care at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2039,459,1196,20],"tags":[1804,18134,18135,2640,18133,2327],"class_list":["post-37713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-health-medicine","category-history","category-literary-criticism","category-usa","tag-brent-staples","tag-charles-drew","tag-charles-r-drew","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-knick","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37713"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52115,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37713\/revisions\/52115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}