Praise for The Good Doctors
Those who think themselves familiar with the civil rights movement in the United States are in for a welcome surprise. The Good Doctors by prizewinning historian John Dittmer tells the heroic, and previously overlooked, story of an organization that stood at the barricades in every civil rights struggle from Selma to Chicago to Wounded Knee, battling inequality and racism in the medical profession while setting up clinics that today reach hundreds of thousands of underserved patients. The Good Doctors should be required reading for every American who views quality health care as a basic human right.
David Oshinsky, author of Polio: An American Story, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in History
This book is a historical landmark. Dittmers chronicle of civil rights health care workers is captivating. All of us need to appreciate these brave pioneers.
Alvin F. Poussaint, M.D., Harvard Medical School
Deeply researched, brilliantly conceived, beautifully written, and unsparing in its analysis of every character who walks across its pages, The Good Doctors is a triumph of passionate scholarship and balanced judgment.
James H. Jones, author of Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
The good doctors of John Dittmers history of the Medical Committee for Human Rights labored at the crossroads of American medicine and American racism. Forty years later the nation chose for its president a black man committed to universal health carean incredible valedictory to the risky and humanistic work of the MCHR. The Good Doctors relates the beginning of that American journey: the story of health workers confronting a system hardwired to deliver second-class medicine to people of color. The Good Doctors is an important, dramatic, and timely contribution to our understanding of racism in medicine and health equity in America.
Fitzhugh Mullan, M.D., George Washington University
In this era of racial healing, The Good Doctors is a shocking reminder of how recently Jim Crow reigned over medical care in America. Well into the 1960s, many hospitals and doctors offices remained segregated, with blacks given separate and grossly unequal access to beds, waiting rooms, and other basic services. Dittmer tells the tale of the courageous few in the medical profession who fought racial injustice and went on to many other battles in the 1960s and early 1970s. Freedom Summer, Selma, the antiwar movement, Alcatraz, Wounded Kneetheyre all here, in this tour of a turbulent and inspiring time that speaks forcefully to our own.
Tony Horwitz, author of A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World and Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War
THE GOOD DOCTORS
THE
GOOD DOCTORS
The Medical Committee for Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice in Health Care
JOHN DITTMER
University Press of Mississippi / Jackson
For Craig and Caitlin, and Grace and Rose
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.
Copyright 2009 by John Dittmer
Originally published in 2009 by Bloomsbury Press, New York
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First UPM Printing 2017
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dittmer, John, 1939 author. | Reprint of (manifestation): Dittmer, John, 1939 Good doctors. 2009.
Title: The good doctors : the Medical Committee for Human Rights and the struggle for social justice in health care / John Dittmer.
Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Reprint of: The good doctors / John Dittmer. New York : Bloomsbury Press, 2009.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016048013 (print) | LCCN 2016049039 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496810359 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781496810366 (epub single) | ISBN 9781496810373 (epub institutional) | ISBN 9781496810380 (pdf single) | ISBN 9781496810397 (pdf institutional)
Subjects: | MESH: Medical Committee for Human Rights (U.S.) | Voluntary Health Agencieshistory | Social Justicehistory | Civil Rightshistory | Physicians | Health Services Accessibilityhistory | Health Care Reformhistory | History, 20th Century | United States
Classification: LCC RA418 (print) | LCC RA418 (ebook) | NLM WA 1 | DDC 362.1dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016048013
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
Contents
Preface
Of all forms of inequality, injustice in health care
is the most shocking and inhumane.
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1)
M ore than half a century ago upwards of a thousand volunteers, most of them northern white college students, traveled to Mississippi to work with black civil rights activists in communities across the state. The organizers of the 1964 Freedom Summer also invited health care professionals to attend to the volunteers medical needs. Dozens of doctors, nurses, and social workers worked in the state that summer under the banner of a new organization, the Medical Committee for Human Rights. That fall, MCHR became a permanent organization of health care professionals with chapters in major cities across the country. For the rest of the decade they provided health care for civil rights workers in the Deep South, desegregated area hospitals, and picketed at conventions of the American Medical Association, protesting the AMAs refusal to require its southern affiliates to admit black physicians. Beginning in the late sixties, MCHR shifted its focus to the urban centers of the North, with local chapters developing task forces to deal with problems ranging from prison reform to occupational health and safety.
The Medical Committees evolution provides insight into the internal dynamics of the social reform movements of that era. Most of the founders were established Jewish physicians, the children of Eastern European immigrants. Born and raised in New York City, they were active in groups that would later be known as the Old Left. A second wave of health care activists became politically involved as medical and nursing students in the mid-1960s, influenced by the egalitarian platform of the Students for a Democratic Society. While there were periods of tension, the MCHR was unique in that Old and New Left radicals bridged generational and ideological gaps to work together.
Although Medical Committee activists divided over strategy and tactics, they all agreed that health care in the United States was inadequate, unjust, racist, and in need of major overhaul. In addition to their direct action programs, MCHR chapters established free health clinics in inner cities and campaigned for a national health service that would cover all Americans. The Medical Committees most enduring and significant contribution has been the comprehensive community health center, an idea born in the fall of 1964 at a meeting of health care activists in Greenville, Mississippi. By 2016, twenty-five million Americans received quality care in community health centers across the country.
Finally, a word about the title. I do not mean for it to be taken ironically. Although this book records many examples of naivet, wrongheadedness, and ego-tripping (among other shortcomings), I admire these good doctors for who they were and are, for what they have done and are still doing. As for doctors, think of the broader dictionary definition, that of medical practitioner. Most MCHR members were physicians, but many were not, and their contributions, particularly those of the nurses working in the South, were significant, to say the least. And while the Medical Committee for Human Rights is at the center of this study, other organizations and individuals played an important role in the postwar movement to provide a health care system for all Americans based on egalitarian principles, free from discrimination by race or social class.
