Race, American Medicine, and Public Health: African American Experiences

“Drawn from the rare book and manuscript collections of the Countway Library's Center for the History of Medicine highlights some of the medical aspects of slavery and racism."

“The American Slavery Documents Collection contains an assortment of legal and personal
documents related to slavery in the United States…The collection brings to light the details of
the lives and deaths of free and enslaved African Americans during the Antebellum and early
Reconstruction Eras.

This digital exhibition prepared by the U.S. National Library of Medicine highlights the
experiences of African Americans in the Civil War including physicians, nurses, and social
activists, and on the battlefield, in hospitals and in contraband camps.

A compilation of biographies and information on black medical schools and societies, hospitals,
folk medicine practices, and achievements of African Americans within the field of medicine.

A bibliography of sources relating to nurses Mamie O. Hale, Mary Eliza Mahoney, Jessie Sleet
Scales, Mary Seacole, Mabel Keaton Staupers, Susie King Taylor, Sojourner Truth, Harriet
Tubman, Betty Smith Williams, Estelle Massey Osborne, Hazel W. Johnson-Brown, Adah Belle, Samuel Thoms.

Offering valuable insights to students of the history of medicine and to researchers seeking an historical context for current epidemiology, this collection contributes to our understanding of the global, social-history, and public-policy implications of disease.

The collection provides general background information on diseases and epidemics worldwide, and is organized around significant “episodes,” topics, and people concerned with contagious disease.

From UNC, Greensboro. This website compiles various independent online collections focused upon race and slavery in the American South. Though the current focus is on North Carolina, there is data relating to all 15 slave states and Washington, D.C.

Connects to digitized resources held within U.S. libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions.

“Documenting the American South is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access
to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently
DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.”

Part of the National Library of Medicine's digital collections. Copies of articles, reports and correspondence compiled for the 1972-1973 ad hoc advisory panel commissioned to investigate the United States Public Health Service Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male at Tuskegee and Macon County, Alabama.

Scholarly commentaries on the history of disease, selected from digitized primary sources from Harvard University's libraries and museums

This site highlights African Americans pioneers in academic surgery, contemporary pioneers,
new frontiers in academic surgery, and the brief history of African Americans in medical
education. The site uses primary sources and narrative descriptions of people and places that influence African Americans in medicine.

Provides access to the primary documents relating to the “history of women physicians, beginning with the first medical school for women, Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP).