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The N.M.A.'s new president, Dr. James M. Whittico Jr., 51, had a head start as the son of a successful physician, is now a general surgeon and fellow of the American College of Surgeons and has staff privileges at nine St. Louis hospitals. But even he had a rough time in the 1950s, when two Negro hospitals were closed down and white hospitals were not accepting Negroes. And today, he notes, fully one-fifth of the other 65 black doctors in St. Louis have no staff posts. Whittico has had ten referrals from white doctors in 17 years. Only three of the patients were white.
Female Taboo. The choice of specialty is also limited. Los Angeles Psychiatrist Hiawatha Harris once dreamed of concentrating in obstetrics but soon found that this was the most tabooed field of all. In some medical schools, Negro students until recently were not allowed to go on obstetric rounds. Even city and county hospitals with mostly nonwhite patients, barred Negroes on the off-chance that they might have to examine a white woman.
"In a racist environment," says Manhattan's Dr. John V. Cordice Jr., "a Negro is better received where there's a minimum of contact with patients. For example, a radiologist—all he does is look at X rays. A pathologist is acceptable because he deals only with cadavers and specimens. A pediatrician is pretty well received; somehow, it's all right for a black man or black woman to handle children—an extension of the black-nanny syndrome."
Dr. Cordice's chosen specialty was thoracic surgery. No U.S. school was willing to train him, and he had to go to Paris. That got him into Kings County (Brooklyn) Hospital for two years, and later he was named chief of both thoracic and vascular surgery at Harlem Hospital. So far, so good—or at least, not bad. But then Columbia's P. & S. took over Harlem, in a well-meant but abortive attempt by the city to raise ghetto-hospital standards. Columbia's white administrators did not bother to consult or even notify Dr. Cordice. They simply announced that two of their brethren were taking over the thoracic and vascular divisions, but Dr. Cordice was told that he could stay on the staff if he chose. He did not so choose. Colleagues claim that he was sacked simply because he was not a member of the club.
Sicker at Birth. The campaign to improve the lot of black doctors is not simply a matter of matching numbers, status symbols, ego satisfaction, or even the doctor's self-image, which is a vital factor in his ability to practice confidently and well. Health and medical care are as essential to the Negro's joining the mainstream of American life as are education and job opportunities. Indeed health may be more fundamental, and Negroes are sicker than whites from womb to tomb—their infant-mortality rate is double that of whites. A child can learn little, even in a vastly improved school system, if he is suffering —as are many Negroes in both North and South—from borderline malnutri tion, iron deficiency and anemia, as well as assorted infectious and parasitic diseases.
The nation needs hundreds of health centers in both rural and urban slums.
And it will take Negro doctors, in whom patients must develop confidence, to give this care the full dimensions of social as well as medical achievement.