February 13, 2019
Page 5
A Long History of Health Disparities
Black Americans
still recovering from
wrongful past
by D anny p eterson
t he p ortlanD o bserver
The United States is still recovering from a lack of
healthcare access for African Americans and lack of op-
portunities for black medical professionals.
Critical gains have been made to close the gap in health
disparities for African Americans in recent years but there
are still significant disparities for African Americans when
it comes to high blood pressure, diabetes, and stroke.
According to the Center for Disease Control, more Af-
rican Americans of middle ages are living with or dying
of many conditions typically found in white Americans at
older ages. The CDC cites socioeconomic factors, lifestyle
behaviors, social environment—like racial discrimination,
and lack of access to preventive health-care services--as
some of the multiple factors that contribute to the health
disparities for African Americans.
On the positive side, the death rate for black Americans
has declined about 25 percent over the past decade, and
some health experts believe the passage of the Affordable
Care Act championed by former President Barack Obama
may have lowered socioeconomic disparities in health
care access, particularly for states like Oregon that opted
in to expand Medicaid.
Disparities in health outcomes are considered a residual
effect of segregated healthcare, which persisted through
the mid-20th century, until the Johnson Administration
used the Civil Rights Act as the basis for requiring hospi-
photo C ourtesy W ikimeDia C ommons
Dr. James McCune Smith was the first African
American physician with a medical degree to hold
practice in the U.S. The pioneering doctor dispelled
common misconceptions about race, intelligence and
medicine.
tals to desegregate as a condition for receiving funds from
the then-newly established Medicare program in 1966.
Even after Medicaid was enacted, however, many hos-
pitals continued to discriminate against black and poor
people until some legal action was done. In the south
“separate but equal” hospitals were often inadequate, pro-
viding substandard care to people of color, and rarely pro-
vided access for black physicians or nurses.
Despite these barriers, the contribution of African
Americans to medicine in the U.S. dates back to the Amer-
ican Revolutionary War.
The first African American man to earn a medical de-
gree to practice in the US was physician and scholar Dr.
James McCune Smith, who earned his medical degree in
Scotland in 1837 after being denied college admission
stateside. He was also the first black physician to run a
pharmacy he established. As an abolitionist, he used his
medical and statistics training to refute common miscon-
ceptions about race, intelligence and medicine.
As the number of African Americans who obtained
medical degrees increased, so did a movement by black
physicians to form their own medical institutions, teach-
ing hospitals, and medical societies, in response to racism
in American medicine.
One of the first physicians to ever perform a success-
ful open-heart surgery in the US was African American
Dr. Daniel Williams in 1893. He also founded the first in-
terracial and black-owned hospital, Provident Hospital in
Chicago, in 1891. He later became chief surgeon at Freed-
men’s Hospital—one of less than a handful of traditional
black hospitals that still exists today--in Washington, DC,
now called Howard University Hospital. Williams later
helped form a professional organization for African Amer-
C ontinueD on p age 15