By Anoushka Kuswaha ’24
Staff Writer
In a recent panel hosted by the American Medical Association, physicians discussed how the COVID-19 pandemic has not only pulled back the curtain on how racism and economic status affect patients worldwide, but also how it continues to affect BIPOC scientists and clinicians in the medical field.
Given the relevance of broader discussion about racial disparities in the healthcare system, the Mount Holyoke News Health and Science section is spotlighting the legacy of medical advancements made by the BIPOC scientists and clinicians of the distant and nearly forgotten past.
It is well documented that doctors experience racial barriers in medical practice. While African Americans make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, only 5 percent of physicians are Black, according to the United States Census and Association of American Colleges’ U.S. Physician Workforce data.
In 1837, after American universities denied him a medical degree due to racist admissions policies, James McCune Smith graduated from the University of Glasgow in Scotland and became the first African American man to receive a medical degree. Howard University became the first school with a medical program for African Americans when it opened a medical department in 1867.
Before 1892, when racist practices forbade Black physicians from joining medical professional organizations like the AMA, Black medical professionals formed new organizations. The physician Robert Boyd founded the National Medical Association in 1895, of which he became the first president. The NMA would become the oldest and largest national organization representing African American physicians. The NMA worked to combat racism in medicine by establishing the National Hospital Association in 1923 to assess the quality of Black patient care, commissioning studies of diseases impacting minorities and fighting to desegregate nursing and medical schools during the civil rights movement.
In spite of societal condemnation for being a woman seeking a medical degree in India, Dr. Anandi Gopal Joshi stood by her goals to provide better medical care to Indian women. In 1886, she became the first Indian woman to receive a degree in Western medicine from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. Less than a year after graduating, she died of tuberculosis at age 21.
Joshi graduated within four years of other pioneers, such as Keiko Okami (the first Japanese physician to receive a degree in Western medicine from a Western university in 1889), Sabat Islambouli (the first Syrian female physician of Jewish descent to receive a degree in Western medicine from a Western university in 1890), and Susan La Flesche Picotte (the first Native American woman to become a physician in the United States, who graduated in 1889 and went on to represent her Omaha reservation’s interests in campaigning for public health education on issues such as tuberculosis and temperance). All of these people fought against the odds for themselves, their communities and the advancement of science and medicine.