Apology Shines Light on Racial Schism in Medicine

[groovedaddy]

Organized medicine has long reflected that most American of obsessions: race. For well over a century, the American Medical Association has been the nation’s largest and most powerful physicians’ group — and an overwhelmingly white one. Black physicians have their own, lesser-known group, the National Medical Association.

On July 10, a spotlight fell briefly on this schism. The A.M.A. made a rare public address to the N.M.A. to deliver an even rarer message: an apology to the nation’s black physicians, citing a century of “past wrongs.”

What wrongs, exactly? Dr. W. Montague Cobb could have answered that question at length.

Dr. Cobb — physician, physical anthropologist, civil rights activist, president of the National Medical Association in the 1960s — knew that the organization owed its very formation to racial barriers. It was founded in 1895 after the A.M.A. refused to seat three African-American delegates at its annual meetings in 1870 and 1872.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/health/views/29essa.html?th&emc=th

[derby378]

1. Hell, the American Institute of Homeopathy seated black delegates long before the AMA did

And the AIH is actually older than the AMA, making it the oldest national medical association in America.

Not that I'm into this whole "vital force" business, but as far as representation for women and blacks is concerned, the AIH was ahead of its time.