BOOKS

This book examines an important event that displays an intersection of African-American history and American medical history—the black hospital movement. Black physicians associated with the two leading black medical societies, the National Medical Association (NMA) and the National Hospital Association (NHA), initiated the movement in the 1920s in order to upgrade the medical and educational programs at black hospitals. The history of the black hospital movement shows how black physicians made a place for themselves within the profession of medicine between 1920 and 1945, a time when few of them had options beyond the separate, but never equal, black and medical worlds. The book focuses on the attempts by various forces to maintain black hospitals—black physicians, community leaders, local and federal governments, and major health care organizations. The changes associated with the rise of the modern hospital and how it affected African-American physicians including their responses to these changes at a time when racial discrimination severely restricted their options are presented. This book analyzes the black hospital movement at both the national and local levels, and focuses on the movement in three communities—Tuskegee, Alabama; Chicago, Illinois; and Cleveland, Ohio.