Black Physicians in the Jim Crow South, 1880–1960 - Hardcover

Ward Jr., Thomas J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1557287562 ISBN 13: 9781557287564

Publisher: University of Arkansas Press, 2003

Synopsis

In this comprehensive account, Thomas J. Ward examines the development of the African American medical profession in the South. Under segregation, the white medical profession provided inadequate service at best to African American patients. Paradoxically, African Americans could gain financial success and upward mobility by becoming doctors themselves. Ward tracks the rise of African American medical schools, professional organizations, and hospitals. He also explores the difficulties that African American physicians faced as an elite group within a subjugated caste, and the many ways in which their education, prestige, and relative wealth put them at odds with the southern caste system. Within the black community, in turn, this prestige often pushed doctors into the public sphere as business leaders, civic spokesmen, and political activists. Drawing on a variety of sources from oral histories to the records of professional organizations, this book illuminates the contradictions of race and class in the South and provides valuable new insight into class divisions within African American communities in the era of segregation.

About this title

About the Author

Thomas J. Ward Jr. is an assistant professor of history at Rockhurst University. He was the writer and co-producer of Mississippi Voices: A Trip through the Twentieth Century, a public radio program, and was an assistant editor for the Mississippi Oral History Project.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1557287562
• ISBN 13: 9781557287564
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 300