I write about race because my love for America, for the promise of her expressed principles, compels me to do so. As I experience it, racism is America’s gangrene. There are times when affected extremities have been treated with low grade antibiotics, but collectively we have never been able to excise the rotted flesh from the body politic. Instead for the most part, we drag the infected along, pretend not to notice its stench, all the while periodically tightening the tourniquet, quite sure that cutting off flow to the problem will somehow make it go away. It won’t you know.

Two weeks ago, the American Medical Association, the largest and most powerful association of doctorsi n the U.S., apologized for the way it had shut out black doctors and refused to share information or resources with them. What information? I don’t know. But the directors of the AMA believe this exclusion by the white medical establishment was serious enough that the practice of medicine in America was weakened. Here’s an example:

Transplant surgeon Clive Callender has hurtful memories of being the only Black doctor at medical meetings in the 1970s, met with stark silence when he pleaded for better access to transplant organs for Blacks.

So when the American Medical Association formally apologized Thursday for more than a century of policies that excluded Blacks from a group long considered the voice of American doctors, it was belated, but still welcome.

“My attitude is not one of bitterness, but one of gratefulness that finally they have seen the error of their ways,” said Callender, now 71 and a respected leader at Howard University Hospital in Washington.AMA apologizes to Black doctors for past racism, New Pittsburgh Courier online

Another example:

When Dr. Edward W. Reed left Meharry Medical College to enter private practice in Memphis in 1962, membership in the Memphis & Shelby County Medical Society not being opened to people of color like him was an unwritten rule.

That meant that Reed also couldn’t join the American Medical Association or its Tennessee affiliate. And at that time, none of Memphis’ three major hospitals had a black doctor on their staff, the retired surgeon recalled.

Reed, now 87, would go on to integrate those hospitals and make his mark on the medical profession. Last spring, he was one of three doctors recognized by the Tennessee Medical Association with 2008 outstanding physician awards.
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“It was a long time coming,” Reed said about the apology. “It’s diminishing, but you have some disparities continuing. The magic wand has not been waved and it’s all disappeared.” Medical society’s apology helps, but racial disparities remain, Getahn Ward

It is so sad really. Isn’t it? I choked up when I read the article because Dr. Jackson, in Rockville, Maryland, saw to me when I was a child. He was a decent and congenial man, and he made house calls. He was the black doctor who cared for all the black families in the area. Sometimes he seemed distracted. And sometimes me, my mom and grandma would joke amongst ourselves. We’d joke that maybe Dr. Jackson wasn’t up on the latest information.

Maybe he wasn’t and maybe that was not completely his fault. Maybe as he went from house to house, nursing little girls like me through German Measles, he did not have time to pour through medical newsletters and journals. Maybe he could not afford a fancy medical library. Lord knows, many of his clients had little money to pay. Maybe if he had had access to a large network of colleagues, he could have pooled his knowledge with theirs and shared information about the latest research and remedies. Maybe.

I am just starting to read Harriet A. Washington’s ‘Medical Apartheid.’ The evidence of longstanding racism in the medical treatment of black people is hard and strong medicine.