 I am Ruben Warren and I direct the National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care at Tuskegee University. I want to welcome you to our second year and our second session honoring Black History Month. Last year, around this time, we had an extremely exciting session. We honored every week at this time, an important moment in Black history. It was an exciting time and the recordings are available if you wish to view them. This year, I am equally as excited about another series where the Bioethics Center at Harvard School of Medicine and the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University are partnering to really honor and present important information. You may have been with us last week when we had an exciting session, an exciting session, looking at the really the history of medicine in the context of medical education. Beyond racism, seizing your moment in time and building forward. We had exciting and exciting panel. Dr. Louis Sullivan, President Emeritus of Muller School of Medicine and former U.S. Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. George Daly, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Valerie Montgomery Rice, President and CEO of the Morehouse School of Medicine. We had a moderator, Dr. Joan Reed, who was in fact a fully active participant in the conversation. Dr. Reed is the Dean of Diversity and Community Partnerships at the Harvard Medical School. So we have an exciting event this evening. Dr. Trug, Robert Trug is usually co-moderates with me, but he is very busy in the intensive care unit as a doctor caring for babies and children. He will join us later tonight, I hope. But we have an equally as important co-moderator, my junior colleague, Dr. Chloe Adams White, who is currently, for the second year, the President of the Bow Ethics Honors Program here at Tuskegee University. Chloe has done an outstanding job in leadership at this university and we're very proud of her. I want to turn it over to Chloe to introduce our outstanding speaker for this evening. Chloe, before we do that, I apologize. Before we do that, let me point out some highlights. This event is being recorded. The event will be posted on the Center for the Bow Ethics YouTube page. Please submit questions at any time using the Q&A feature found in the meeting controls at the bottom of your screen. Please select questions. The selected questions will be discussed after the presentation, so hold them to the end. We will continue the conversation on Twitter using the link that you see. Use the chat feature to share comments or technical issues and you will also hear about the upcoming events after this evening. We have, as I said, we've honored Black History Month every for the last two years and this is the second of four sessions. February 16th, 6 to 7.30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, we'll have another exciting session toward health equity against maddling racist barriers for Black healthcare students. And on February 23, 6 to 7.30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, we'll talk about well-being and healing for future generations. So you see, we've worked hard the entire year. We plan intentionally for you to have a good time and we look forward to the conversation by my friend and colleague, Dr. Gamble. Boy, will you more formally introduce our keynote speaker. Hello, everyone. I hope you're doing well this evening. I'm going to introduce our speaker tonight. Our speaker for today's session is Dr. Vanessa Northington Gamble, university professor of medical humanities at the George Washington University. She is the first woman and African-American to hold this prestigious endowed faculty position. She is also professor of health policy in the Milken Institute of Public Health and professor of American Studies in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Gamble is a junct professor of nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. Throughout her career, she has worked to promote equity and justice in medicine and public health. A physician, scholar, and activist, Dr. Gamble is an internationally recognized expert on the history of African-American medicine, racial and ethnic disparities in health and health care, public health ethics, and bioethics. She is the author of several widely acclaimed publications on the history of race and racism in American medicine and bioethics. Public service has been a hallmark of her career. She has served on many boards and chaired the committee that took the lead role in the successful campaign to obtain an apology in 1997 from President Clinton for the United States public health syphilis study at Tuskegee. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the Hastings Center. A proud native of West Philadelphia, Dr. Gamble received her BA from Hampshire College and her MD and PhD in the history and sociology of science from the University of Pennsylvania. Thank you so much, Dr. Gamble, for speaking with us today about the African-American graduates of the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania during its first 75 years. Thank you, Chloe, for such a wonderful introduction. Thank you. I'm very happy to be here and also to be here with my friend, Ruben Warren. So thank you. As I said, I really am happy to be here. Okay, let's get this party started here. Okay, I'm going to start talking about the book that my recent book called Black and White Space that was written by my former teacher at Penn, who's now at Yale, Dr. Elijah Anderson. And in this book, he examines what he calls the white space, namely settings in which black people are typically absent, not expected, or marginalized when present. These include predominantly white medical schools. Well, there is a vast body of medical education literature that focuses on the experiences of African-Americans in these programs after the advent of the 1960s affirmative action programs. There's not much on earlier periods. This evening, I will discuss an earlier period and focus on the education of the first generation of black women graduates at Philadelphia's Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania from 1850 to 1925. I will explore these graduates' backgrounds, their medical education, their careers and challenges as they sought a foothold in medicine during the late 19th and early 20th century, a period I would like to emphasize of rigid racial segregation, unrelenting discrimination, firm white racist ideology, and rigid societal confines of race and gender. Such a historical examination of WMCP's historical analysis of WMCP broadens our understanding of racism and medical education and illuminates the experiences African-Americans, in this case women, in white medical spaces. Two years after its founding in 1850, Sarah Maps Douglas became not only WMCP's first black student, but the first African-American woman to attend an American medical college. However, she did not graduate. In 1867, Dr. Rebecca J. Cole became the school's first African-American graduate and the nation's second black woman physician. The reason why there is a question mark by her name is that historians aren't sure that this is actually Rebecca Cole and so that's why I'm putting a question mark by her name. Three years earlier in 1864, the first black woman physician, Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, received her degree from Boston's New England Female Medical College. Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania by 1925, its 75th year, had become an institution of singular importance for African-American women who aspire to earn medical degrees. 18 black women had graduated by then and four others had studied at the school. Only historically black Howard University School of Medicine and Mahary Medical College exceeded WMCP and the number of black women graduates. African-American students often endured racism at WMCP and felt isolated and alienated from their white classmates. They also had to navigate the school's discriminatory internship policy that prohibited African-Americans from training at its hospital, making plain WMCP's educational objective to prepare African-Americans for medical careers primarily and black medical spaces. However, despite the racism that they endured, the school's black alumni received an education that allowed them to make valuable contributions to medicine and black communities in the United States and in Africa. Although later excluded from white professional spaces, they used their WMCP degrees to found hospitals, establish civic organizations, provide medical care to communities neglected by white physicians, and gain prominence as social activists and thought leaders. WMCP's influential role in the medical education of African-Americans was certainly evident in the early 20th century when black physician Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Stewart, a graduate of New York New York Medical College for Women, praised her sisters of a darker race who have taken advantage of stepping into the doors of medical opportunity. The sisters who graduated from WMCP between 1867 and 1925 certainly represented a dizzying range of experiences. Hailing from 10 states and the District of Columbia, they were the daughters of ministers, physicians, farmers, laundresses, logists, abolitionists, and the enslaved, and even the great granddaughter of an African-American slaveholder. Many of the first black women to attempt WMCP came from socially prominent families and which daughters were urged to become educated to avoid becoming trapped in lives of menial labor or domestic service. Classmates Dr. Caroline Stillwiley Anderson and Dr. Georgiana Patterson Young were members of prosperous abolitionist families. Anderson's parents ran one of the most active stations of the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia. Her father, William Still, a wealthy coal merchant, is frequently referred to as the father of the Underground Railroad. Georgiana Patterson's young parents were likewise comfortably situated and politically active. WMCP also attracted the daughters of religious leaders. Dr. Haley Tanner Dillon Johnson was the daughter of Bishop Benjamin Tucker Tanner, a distinguished African Methodist Episcopal leader. Dr. Varena Harris Morton Jones was also the daughter of an AME minister. Her mother's ancestors included John Carothers Stanley, an emancipated slave who became a wealthy landowner and slaveholder. Dr. Pauline Dinkins' father was a Baptist minister and served as the president of Historically Black Selma University. Three of the early WMCP graduates followed their fathers into medicine. Dr. Alice Hathaway-Pervis-Robie was the daughter of Dr. Charles Berleau-Pervis, a prominent physician who had served as surgeon-in-chief at Washington D.C.'s Freedman's Hospital. Daisy Bonner's father, Dr. E.B. Brown, operated a successful practice in Greenville, Mississippi, and he was also a shrewd businessman who by 1911 might have been Mississippi's richest African American. Dr. Lillian Atkins Moore Clark came to the school from Hampton, Virginia, where she was a member of a family recognized among the first families of Virginia. Her father, Dr. William E. Atkins, served on the County Board of Health and co-founded the Local Black Medical Association. If WMCP proved to be an important training ground for aspiring female doctors from elite African American families, it also drew Black women from very disadvantaged backgrounds. Indeed, Rebecca Cole, the school's first Black graduate, was the daughter of a Philadelphia laborer and laundress. Cole was followed by several others who had equally hard scramble upbringings. Dr. Juan Bedett Drummond was the great granddaughter of Paul Cuffee, a Quaker shipbuilder and merchant who may have been the wealthiest African American in the early 19th century. By the time she received her medical degree from WMCP in 1888, the family's fortunes had long evaporated. Her maternal grandmother had been left with no option other than to seek public assistance. Pennsylvania and Dr. Alice Woodby McCain, the daughter of a day laborer, became orphaned by the age of seven and suffered from temporary blindness for three years during her childhood. Dr. Lucy Hughes Brown grew up poor in North Carolina. Poverty also plagued Dr. Matilda Arabelle Evans, who was born in Aitken County, South Carolina, to formerly enslaved parents. According to Evans biographer Dr. Darlene Clarkine, Evans was one of the few desperately poor Black women who managed to escape lifelong consignment to domestic drudgery and agricultural P&H. Evans later helped Dr. Melissa Thompson-Copen, a South Carolinian from a humble farming family, receive financial assistance to attend women's medical college. The family of Philadelphia and Dr. Virginia M. Alexander barely kept afloat financially after the death of her mother who had worked as a housekeeper and the loss of her father's writing academy. Dr. Lulu Cecilia Fleming and Dr. Eliza Ann Greer were both born enslaved in Fleming in Florida and Greer in Mississippi and thus an WMCP education and enabled them to achieve far more than the harsh realities of their early childhood pretended. Physician historian Steve Pitesman has argued that the reception of African-American students at WMCP during the late 19th century and early 20th century was not unfavorable and there are some documents that support his contention. An 1886 newspaper article claimed that the school had always received the women of the colored race with cordiality. When Hailey Johnson attended the medical college, she embraced her presence as a form of race work. She saw it as doing much towards opening the eyes of our white friends as to the Negro's intellectual capacity. The election of black women to leadership positions indicated that some were welcomed and accepted by their white classmates. For example, Caroline Anderson was elected treasurer of the alumni association and Matilda Evans and Lillian Clark were elected class officers. When Melissa Coppin entered WMCP in 1906, she was the only African-American in her class. During her last three years, she was the only African-American in the entire school. She however contended that she had not encountered any racial prejudice during her years there. According to one of her classmates, she had the honor and respect of both faculty and the student body. However rosy these accounts may be, strong evidence makes plain that black WMCP students did indeed encounter racism and had to find ways to endure, navigate and resist it, starting with the first African-American graduate. During her senior year, Rebecca Cole had to complete a clinical clerkship at the medical colleges hospital and outpatient dispensary, requiring her to share a room with another student. Her classmates racism, not her clinical abilities threatened her fulfilling this graduation prerequisite and consequently her degree. Although one schoolmate described Cole as so white and so bereft of the distinctly bold Negro features, WMCP had difficulty finding someone willing to have a black roommate. Matilda Evans and Eliza Greer also faced racial discrimination ahead of their graduation in 1897 when a white classmate unsuccessfully urged their other classmates not to march with them in the commencement professional. Pulling Dinkins transferred to WMCP in 1917, after two years at Meharry Medical College and found her time at WMCP extremely alienating and demoralizing. In June 1919, right after her graduation, she wrote a frank and poignant letter to Dean Martha Tracy and what she described an environment that made her feel lonely, isolated and disregarded. She wrote, I was never able to feel like a real member of the class, nor even like a part of the school. Dinkins contended every bit of my energy was taken enforcing myself to stay to the end. Dinkins also recalled, never did I recover from one wound before I received another. The Dean dismissed her concerns alleging that they were primarily fueled by Dinkins over sensitive temperament. Virginia Alexander's experiences provide some of the most vivid and detailed accounts of racism at women's medical college and reveal the sense of marginalization that African Americans experience at the school. As a member of the first year class basketball team, Alexander expected to attend a dance organized by the players. However, faculty members canceled the event when they learned that Alexander and her guests plan to attend. She later evoked this incident as the first and bittering experience of her life. In March 1921, during her first year at WMCP, Alexander's classmate held a menstrual show under the auspices of the Young Women's Christian Association to raise funds for Near East Relief. The event included students performing in blackface as the gold dust twins, the racist caricatures from a washing powder advertisement. The program promoted in the school bulletin and supported by faculty and students suggest an unwelcoming racial climate for African American students. Three years later, Alexander organized a meeting between Dean Tracy and the other black students at the school, May McCarroll, Carolyn Johnson, and Mildred Friedman to call attention to another episode of racism at the school. This time it was the behavior of Dr. Henry Jump, an influential professor at the school. They contended that he enjoyed telling every discredible, dirty, and insulting story about black people that he could think of whenever there were African Americans in his classes, and that he verbally discredited their accomplishments by chiding them that they would always still be Negroes. The students condemned Jump's actions and declared when the situation became intolerable, our self-respect demanded that we register protests. Dean Tracy, however, was not swayed by their grievance and supported him. The early 20th century saw a transformation of medical education and clinical practice that made postgraduate clinical training essential for physicians' professional survival. However, at the same time, the hospital affiliated with women's medical college barred black women from internships. This racially discriminatory policy highlights the racism that black women physicians encounter from their white colleagues and makes playing WMCP's role in sustaining a racial divide in the female medical world. These exclusionary practices were not limited to WMCP. Other women's hospitals refused to admit African Americans into women, into their training programs. Thus, as more states required internships for licensure, black women physicians found their future in medicine increasingly jeopardized. This, however, was not the case for white women as they had large access, they had access to a large number of internship slots. The challenges faced by Dr. Isabella Van Der Waal graphically illuminates the predicament of black women seeking postgraduate training. In 1917, she wrote a blistering essay, Some Problems of the Colored Women Physician for the Women's Medical Journal, in which she pointedly just detailed how the racism of white women physicians blocked opportunities for black women physicians and how their whiteness advanced their careers and that it gave them professional privileges denied to black women. She vividly described her for failed attempts to obtain an internship and explicitly laid bare the pain, anger and frustration she experienced during the process. Although Van Der Waal had graduated in 1915 from the New York Medical College and Hospital for Women as the valedictorian, she could not get an internship at the school's hospital solely because of a race. She eventually received an offer from the Syracuse Hospital for Women and Children, but the superintendent withdrew it when she discovered that the new intern was black. Van Der Waal had traveled to Syracuse for this internship and thus the superintendent had not seen her before she arrived in Syracuse. Van Der Waal pled with various officials to salvage her internship, but the decision remained the same. We do not doubt your ability, but you are colored. Therefore, we will not have you. Defiantly, the young physician responded to her rejection with legal action. Assisted by the NAACP, she sued the hospital for racial prejudice and breach of contract and won a financial settlement. Van Der Waal never secured an internship, but she obtained medical licenses in New York and New Jersey before their laws mandating an internship took effect. Her article was a clarion call for more postgraduate training programs for African American women. Black women who graduated from Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania also encountered racially discriminatory obstacles when they saw internships at other hospitals established specifically to train women physicians. In 1910, Boston's New England Hospital for Women and Children had accepted four African American interns, including WNCP graduates Caroline Anderson and Alice Roby. In 1878, Caroline Anderson became the hospital's first black intern. Initially, the medical staff rejected her because they contended that patients would refuse treatment from an African American physician. However, the hospital board overruled this decision. No patients objected to Anderson, but that may have been because the resident physician had found it necessary to be careful in choice of patients who came under her care. Anderson upon completing her internship returned to Philadelphia and in 1895 became the first attending gynecologist at the recently open Douglas Memorial Hospital, the city's first black hospital. The reaction of white colleagues to the arrival of Melissa Coppin then known as Evelyn Thompson or Melissa Thompson for an internship at New England Hospital for Women and Children in January 1911 further illuminates both the racism of white women physicians and the experiences of black women physicians in white medical spaces. After graduating from Women's Medical College in 1910, Coppin applied for an internship and was readily admitted in part because the hospital was short staffed and she was the only applicant. Her acceptance, however, provoked a two-month controversy over whether African American physicians would continue to be welcomed at the hospital. Shortly after her arrival, the hospital superintendent informed Coppin that five of the facility's seven interns threatened to resign rather than to work with a black woman and bluntly asked the fair-skinned woman whether she or color. She confirmed their suspicions and consequently the hospital staff asked her to withdraw her application or be dismissed. At issue was her failure to disclose her race on her application. Coppin tearfully withdrew her application but immediately filed a new one identical to the first except she inserted the bold declaration I am a Negro woman graduate of the Women's Medical of Pennsylvania 1910 holding the required literary qualifications. The application was immediately rejected because the hospital said it was not the right time to accept a colored intern. In 1911 two months after Coppin's arrival in Boston she finally secured her position again as was the case of Caroline Anderson after the hospital board intervened. The medical staff arranged for her to eat and to lodge separately and reorganized the internship service so that she would not work closely with the other interns yet these efforts did not stem the opposition. Less than a week after her start the grievances of the protesting interns found their way to the Boston newspapers and so this is you know from the Baltimore Sunburners also so this controversy was this is in Baltimore it was not just discussed in newspapers in Boston but around the country and you see at the last paragraph there they said that these two physicians and several nurses have announced positively that they will not permit Dr. Thompson to meet them socially neither will they allow her to dine with them. Now this was this controversy over Thompson's admission to the hospital also occurred at the time where Booker T. Washington was attacked in Boston and he was attacked in Boston supposedly by a man who said that Booker T. Washington had disrespected his wife. So while this was happening another newspaper in describing what was happening to Melissa Thompson wrote a little more abuse from those hospital physicians and Dr. Melissa Thompson were ranked as the Booker T. Washington of her sex. The protests against Melissa Thompson were not successful and she went on to complete her internship without further problems. She later obtained additional postgraduate training but this time at a black institution Baltimore's Providence Hospital. When Lillian Clark applied for an internship in 1922 at the WMCB hospital she discovered that the school administrators deliberately steered African-American students solely to black hospitals and black medical spaces for the completion of their professional training. At a time when the hospital faced an internship shortage even Clark's distinguished academic record could not penetrate the school's racially exclusionary policy. Five months after she applied for an internship school officials notified her that every slot had been filled and that despite her accomplishments she had not received one because of her race. The hospital's medical director did inform Clark that her credentials outweigh those of most of the accepted applicants. The medical school did not totally abandon Clark but it made clear that her professional future lie at a black hospital and helped her secure one at Douglas Hospital. The rejection by her alma mater did not derail Clark's career in 1925. She became the first black woman to pass the licensee examination of the national board of medical examiners. After her internship she became chief resident and assistant hospital superintendent at Douglas and by the time of her death in 1934 she had become so well regarded that one obituary called her the wealthiest and most successful race woman doctor in Philadelphia. After successfully obtaining an internship for Clark WMCP Dean Martha Tracy recognized as she put it she would face the problem again when 1925 graduates Virginia Alexander and Mae McCarroll would need positions. Once more Tracy turned to black hospitals and secured positions for them at Kansas City Colored Hospital or Kansas City General Hospital number two. You can guess who was in Kansas City General Hospital number one. The Missouri Hospital had a proud legacy of training black medical professionals but had never appointed a woman doctor to any profession at any position. It's super tended hesitated to consider the two WMCP graduates because of their gender a reflection of the discrimination that black women physicians frequently experience in white and black medical spaces. He eventually relented and Alexander and McCarroll became the first woman interns at the hospital. This is Kansas City Hospital number two and there's the two women with their fellow residents interns and residents and their appointment made first was on the front page of a black newspaper in Kansas City. WMCP provided several states with their first African American women physicians and August 1891 three months after graduation Haley Johnson became the first black woman to practice in Alabama. Seven years later when Eliza Greer became the first black woman physician in Georgia a newspaper account of her accomplishment described her as a cold black woman doctor. Indeed the medical licensing board was astonished that she was as they put it a negress but assessed her as thoroughly informed in her profession. During the late 19th and early 20th century at a time when the color line in Madison was in trans again and the healthcare needs of African Americans were only overwhelming. Black WMCP alumni assumed critical roles in addressing health inequities. They established healthcare institutions including dispensaries, nurse training schools and hospitals and provided care in areas disregarded by the white medical profession. As the distinguished historian Darlene Clark-Kine has argued much of their work would facilitate black survival by keeping black babies and their mothers alive and healthy. When Haley Johnson arrived in Tuskegee she found a town ravaged by disease, despair and destitution describing it as black. It is not only of people of this despised hue but black with disease and death. Around 1893 she established the Lafayette dispensary at Tuskegee Institute to a place where the vital statistics of the color people can and will be studied with intelligence. In 1897 Matilda Evans one of the most prominent WMCP graduates returned home to South Carolina and launched a 30-year medical career in Columbia. She was the city's first woman physician and her arrival initially prompted astonishment. One newspaper account noted that a woman doctor in Columbia would have been somewhat of a novelty but that a colored one was an unexpected innovation in the medical profession. At the time Columbia may have been a home of conservatism and race prejudice but Evans plowed ahead with a medical practice that focused on surgery, obstetrics, gynecology, pediatrics and public health. Using her formidable intellect, prodigious work ethic and strategic cultivation of white physicians, society, women and businessmen she achieved remarkable professional success. A local newspaper went so far as to call her South Carolina's Brainiest Negro. Between 1901 and 1918 Evans established three hospitals in Columbia including the Taylor Lane Hospital in 1901. By 1914 she may have had the largest practice of any African American physician in the state. In 1916 she founded the Negro Health Association of South Carolina to promote public health and black communities throughout the state. Most African American graduates from women's medical college cared almost exclusively for black patients but a few including Evans also had white patients. Wealthy white women might have sought her services for conditions such as venereal diseases and injuries from domestic abuse that they did not want to reveal to white physicians with whom they might share social circles. Virginia Alexander took care of black and white patients in Philadelphia. For several years Alexander was the only black Quaker in Philadelphia and shared this religious affiliation with many of her white patients. Her connections to the Society of Friends also helped her become one of the few African American physicians with a hospital appointment at a white hospital. In 1930 the WMCP hospital appointed her as an assistant physician five years after it had denied her an internship. Although Alexander had gained entry into white medical spaces she continued to encounter racism. Although for example when she went to see a patient at Jefferson Hospital she observed that most of the staff seemed unable to rise to the situation of having ordinary civil or professional relations with a colored doctor. Members of the first generation of African American WNCP graduates also created health care facilities in Africa. Alison McCain, Lulu Fleming, and Pauline Dinkins often open hospitals and dispensaries on the continent. Three years after her 1892 graduation from women's medical McCain and her physician husband Cornelius established the first hospital and nurse training school in Monrovia, Liberia. Lulu Fleming and Pauline Dinkins served as medical missionaries in Africa. Shortly after receiving her WNCP degree in 1895 Fleming resumed her mission in the Congo where she opened a dispensary and provided medical care for four years until ill health forced her back to the United States. On June 20th 1899 she died in Philadelphia from African sleeping sickness. Death however did not remove racism's reach. A local cemetery refused to enter her body because its charter prohibited the burial of African Americans. Following her 1919 graduation Pauline Dinkins opened a private practice in her hometown of Selma, Alabama served as resident physician at Tuskegee Institute and became medical director at Brewer Hospital a small black hospital in Greenwood, South Carolina. In 1928 after studying at the School of Tropical Medicine at the University of London she set sail for Monrovia, Liberia where she established a mission hospital established by women of the Black National Baptist Convention. The careers of early black WNCP graduates demonstrate how activism and resistance are deeply embedded in African Americans women's histories. Historian Stephanie Jay Shaw and her study of black professional women during the Jim Curl period contends that they work both to repair and prevent the damage that frequently resulted from systematic discrimination and thus their work reflected if it was reflected if it was not defined by the neglect of the existing public institutions. This was clearly the case with the African American graduates of WNCP. Their degrees provided them with an opportunity to link their medical careers with broader socio-political efforts to battle oppression and fight for the advancement of African Americans. After her graduation Rebecca Cole worked in a variety of medical and social agencies that served poor black women and became a staunch and she became a staunch advocate for racial justice. She was also active in black women's organizations such as the National Association of Colored Women. She attended the group's 1896 inaugural meeting and assumed a leadership position on its editorial staff. That same year she used the organization's journal the Women's Era as a platform to offer a stinging review to then popular medical theories that attributed the high rates of tuberculosis in African Americans primarily to inherent racial susceptibilities. She instead pointed to social and economic factors such as racism and adequate medical care and poverty as the major contributing factors. Other African American WNCP graduates followed Cole's professional footsteps and crafted careers that combined medicine, social reform, and activism. Caroline Anderson's efforts to improve the status of black physicians, black Philadelphians gained her a reputation as a champion race advocate. In 1909 Alex McCain moved to Boston where she developed strong bonds in medical, political, and civil rights circles. She opened a small practice and taught nurses at Plymouth Hospital, a black facility. A suffragette McCain was twice elected a delegate to the State Republicans Convention. In 1915 she emerged as a fervent activist in the campaign of the National Black, of the National Rights League, a black political organization to ban the screening of the racist birth of a nation in Boston. Her medal was on full display in an April 1915 speech before 800 black women when she passionately proclaimed I say fight, fight to the bitter end. Fight until the last drop of blood is gone. We are not fighting as black people but as American citizens. Despite mass protests efforts to stop the film showing failed. Virginia Alexander used a different tactic in her anti-racism activities. A strong proponent of interracialism, she believed that collaboration and dialogue between blacks and whites were effective tools against racial prejudice. Beginning in 1930 when she became the first black member of the race relations committee of the Philadelphia Society of Friends she used her position to successfully persuade the group to take action against racial discrimination in the city's hospitals. Beginning just two years after its 1850 establishment the women's medical college of Pennsylvania opened the door of medical opportunity for sisters of a darker race. And by 1925 it had educated more African American women than any predominantly white medical school. The history of the 18 black women who graduated from WMCP between 1867 and 1925 vividly illuminates the role that racism has played in the history of women physicians. During its first 75 years WMCP acknowledged the capabilities of African American women to become physicians and thus admitted them to the medical school. However, once admitted to this white space black students at times felt alienated and marginalized because of racist actions by the school's students, faculty and administration. Furthermore WMCP's educational objective was to educate black women for careers not in white professional spaces but in separate black ones. Indeed its racially discriminatory internship policy helped to establish and maintain a racial divide in the female medical world. WMCP expected its graduates to train and practice exclusively in black hospitals not women's hospitals. This policy shaped by contemporary racial politics, customs and prejudices brought into sharp relief the racism that black women doctors encounter from their white female colleagues. Indeed the medical college viewed them primarily as black physicians not as women physicians. WMCP did provide its African American graduates with the education and skills to make significant contributions to medicine and black communities in the United States and Africa and to defy societal expectations about black women as these pioneering physicians made their mark in the world. They clearly demonstrated that medicine was black women's work. Thank you very much. Hello. We have a bunch of questions for you from the audience and as well from some of the panelists. So my personal question that I wanted to ask you is I found it very interesting that many of the women were raised in poverty or had parents that were enslaved or engaged in slavery in some way. I am sure this must have made receiving not only a college degree but becoming a medical doctor extremely difficult. For you has learning about these women and their amazing accomplishments helped to motivate and support you along your personal educational journey. Yes. What a great question. Thank you. Thank you very much for asking that question. How I got interested in the history of black women physicians was for my mentor in medical school by the name of Dr. Helen Dickens. Dr. Dickens father had been born enslaved and she never knew where he was born because after when he left being enslaved he changed the family's name to Dickens because he heard Charles Dickens give a talk and so he changed his name after the fiction writer Charles Dickens and when I would talk to and Dr. Dickens went to the University of Illinois Medical School she graduated in 1934 and in 1950 became the first black woman admitted to the American College of Surgeons and so she and I would talk a lot about black women physicians and for me hearing those stories helps me one I mean I always tell people you know when was the first black woman you know physician I said 1860 you know people sometimes people say you know like last year you know but you know 1864 the show how black women have a long history in the medical profession and that black women belong in medicine and also to see what they overcame helps me you know in terms of what some of my struggles and for me to say that you know some of these some of these are some bad sisters that's the only way I can describe you know just describe that so but it just helps me to see you know from once you know I came and so one of the things I thought was was very important was for the audience to see them you know so I try to know you know I tried to show as much as possible you know what you know you know what they look like thank you for that another question that came up a few times is so many of the women seem to die young can you give any details about their causes of death um yes they did die many of them did die young and there is a variety of reasons why they you know there was cancer some of them um Eliza Greer who was a person who had been um born uh uh enslaved died of a stroke uh Virginia Alexander died from lupus so I have you know you know and that I I'm asked that question a lot and one of the things that I think about is whether you know some of the stresses of their lives their professions contributed to their death um I you know I can raise that I can speculate that you know it may have but I don't have any you know uh definitive you know answer but yes they did die uh uh many of them did die young um another question is please compare the added racial bias that was worsened by sexism and compare it from then to now I mean that's you know I I think that that's that's hard for me to you know to to compare it you know what I I can say is that there is uh there is a continuing um dilemma or challenge for black women physicians in terms of being women and in terms of being uh black I mean there's still you know you know the incident a few years ago on delta where that they wanted a physician and a black woman walked up and said I'm looking for a doctor so that this belief that you know black women cannot be a physician you know when I was in medical school people thought that I was the maid and if you saw my housekeeping skills I'm the last person you wanted for me uh so but you know they you know so so they asked you know so there there's that so there is you know so because sometimes I think if there's a comparison things might be better I think it's just continuing that there's still this stubborn that a black woman cannot be a physician you know when I talked to a lot of my black women friends we all you know it's like so so what happened today so let me tell you what happened today you know has something to do about race the other thing that I wanted to do here is to also make plain that when we look at the history of black women in medicine we also have to look at the the attitudes of some of our white sisters that sisterhood was not always powerful especially when racism was there so that's you know so those are some of the questions and so one of the reasons I wanted to present this paper especially given what the talk is going to be next week about you know trying to dismantle structural inequities and barriers and for healthcare professionals is to let people see that these structural barriers are long-standing and you know and so to have a better idea of the evolution of these these standards these barriers someone else wanted one of the other attendees was curious if you were able to identify some areas of expertise in medicine that were preferred by or less racist or possibly more racist to these doctors or if there was like specialties that they lean towards that they found were a little bit more accepting of them so for these women so I'm looking up to 1925 and so you know in 19 to be up until 1925 there were not what a lot of specialties that we think of today um and and most of the black there were some of most of the black women went into public health went into general went into a general practice and in large part because they were not the specialties and you know there was you know talk about Abraham Flexner in his 1910 report he writes how you know black people you know couldn't become surgeons but that they could you know be going to public health um and so that I mean and this was and going into um public health or or working with women and children that was not just for black women that was for women physicians in general and one of the reasons I remember I admire Matilda Evans is that she was a surgeon and that Taylor I failed to point out and that Taylor hospital picture she is there doing surgery and so when she was able to do surgery because she started her own hospital and at that time you know people could so that for most of the women I talked about today they did general practice or public health one of the things I did not say about Virginia Alexander is that um in 19 you know she was the first black person admitted to the school of public health at Yale so she wanted to specialize in a public health. Thank you I believe now we are handing it over to Dr. Warren. Hey um let's give our esteemed colleague a round of applause. Oh thank you Ruben. She has done. Ruben I hope you noticed I made sure I included the folks who were at Tuskegee. I hope you noticed that. Yes ma'am I appreciate that didn't there I appreciate it but let me say this this has been a scholarly presentation by a scholar and oftentimes you read the scholar but you seldom get a chance to listen to the scholar but with Dr. Gamble you can both read and listen so take advantage of the opportunity I can't thank you enough Vanessa for bringing this to us you've been in many places and you're bringing the culmination of those experiences to this audience. This has been a tremendously informative presentation and it sets the stage for next week because the space the white space and black space for students women and men will be discussed next week and I think it will be a an equally building a conversation um you've been both a friend and a colleague over the years and I'm just pleased to know you and uh look forward to continuing uh interaction I failed to say that with great pride I am the third director of the national center for biotics and research and healthcare and Dr. Gamble was the second and so the stage for me to do some of the things we're trying to do so we're just building on on her legacy and we can't be more proud to do that let me say to all of those who are listening that we set the tone for next week and we hope next week at this time same place same station that you'll come and hear about toward health equity dismantling racist barriers for black healthcare students wherever they may be that's next week and the following week we're going to talk about a very equally as important topic well-being and healing for future generations and what we're looking to do is is get within the medical space but also get in the theological space and also in the educational space and talk about how our children and others are are dealing with the circumstances we find ourselves this has been a tremendously um empowering session for me and I can't again thank you and also for those of you who who are on thank you for your time I look forward to you um next week because we will be here and we really appreciate all that you're giving and all that you've done again Vanessa thank you so much and we'll be in touch okay thank you for having me okay and all okay thank you for joining and we will see you this time next week if not before okay take care okay be blessed