Good Doctors: The Medical Committee for Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice in Health Care
John DittmerOverview
The untold story of the courageous doctors and nurses who fought the battle for racial justice in hospitals, in clinics, and on the streets in the 1960s.
The Medical Committee for Human Rights was organized in the summer of 1964 by medical professionals, mostly white and Northern, to provide care and support for Civil Rights activists who were organizing black voters in Mississippi. They left their lives and lucrative private practices to march beside and tend the wounds of demonstrators from Freedom Summer, to the March on Selma, to the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. Galvanized, and sometimes radicalized, by their firsthand view of disenfranchised communities, the MCHR soon expanded its mission to encompass a range of causes from poverty to the war in Vietnam, and later took on the whole of the United States healthcare system. The MCHR doctors soon realized that fighting segregation would mean not just caring for white volunteers, but exposing and correcting the shocking inequalities in segregated health care. They pioneered community health plans and brought medical care to underserved, or unserved, areas.
Though education was the most famous battleground for integration, the appaling injustice of segregated health care had equally devastating consequences. Award-winning historian John Dittmer, author of the classic Civil Rights history Local People, has written an insightful and moving account of a group of idealists who put their careers in the service of the belief, stated in their motto, that "Health Care Is a Human Right."
Synopsis
The Medical Committee for Human Rights was organized in 1964 to support civil rights activists during Mississippi's Freedom Summer. MCHR volunteers exposed racism within the American Medical Association, desegregated southern hospitals, set up free clinics in inner cities, and created the model for the community health center. They were early advocates of single-payer universal health insurance. In The Good Doctors, celebrated historian John Dittmer gives an insightful account of a group of idealists whose message and example are an inspiration to all who believe that "Health Care is a Human Right."
Dick Maxwell - Library Journal
Emerging during the civil rights struggle in the South in the early 1960s, the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) suffered from a chronic identity crisis and continuous internal turmoil but still left a significant legacy. First providing support for civil rights workers, the many doctors, nurses, and others who were part of MCHR also challenged the American Medical Association's tolerance of racism in its affiliates, worked to desegregate and bring more equity to health care, and helped give rise to the widespread creation of community health centers. Disagreements over organizational structure and where MCHR's political focus should be led to its gradual dissolution in the 1980s. Dittmer (history, DePauw Univ.; Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi) uses interviews plus other primary and secondary sources to shed light on an organization that has remained largely unchronicled. Clearly presented and absorbing, this is recommended for public libraries as well as academic and medical libraries with medical history collections.
Editorials
From the Publisher
“Civil-rights historian Dittmer focuses on one of the lesser-known groups involved in the struggle… Dittmer reveals the motivations of many of the organization’s leaders, and he paints a disturbing picture of the shameful treatment of both black doctors and patients in the South. In the early chapters he writes vividly of the challenges facing civil-rights workers and of the brutality—beatings, jailings, killings—inflicted on them… A stark reminder not just of the actions of a group of idealistic activists but of the violence and turmoil of the nation’s not-so-distant past.” —Kirkus
“Those who think themselves familiar with the civil rights movement in the United States are in for a welcome surprise. The Good Doctors by prize-winning historian John Dittmer tells the heroic, and previously overlooked, story of an organization that stood at the barricades in every civil rights struggle from Selma to Chicago to Wounded Knee, battling inequality and racism in the medical profession while setting up clinics that today reach hundreds of thousands of underserved patients. The Good Doctors should be required reading for every American who views quality health care as a basic human right.”—David Oshinsky, author of Polio: An American Story, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in History
“Deeply researched, brilliantly conceived, beautifully written and unsparing in its analysis of every character who walks across its pages, The Good Doctors is a triumph of passionate scholarship and balanced judgment.”—James H. Jones, author of Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment "A significant contribution to historical analysis of the 1960s … particularly timely today. Dittmer’s satisfying work delivers both historical detail and contextual nuance in an illuminating discussion that fills in a previous gap in the scholarly literature."—American Historical Review "In this era of racial healing, The Good Doctors is a shocking reminder of how recently Jim Crow reigned over medical care in America. Well into the 1960s, many hospitals and doctors’ offices remained segregated, with blacks given separate and grossly unequal access to beds, waiting rooms, and other basic services. Dittmer tells the tale of the courageous few in the medical profession who fought racial injustice and went on to many other battles in the 1960s and early 1970s. Freedom Summer, Selma, the anti-war movement, Alcatraz, Wounded Knee—they’re all here, in this tour of a turbulent and inspiring time that speaks forcefully to our own."—Tony Horwitz, author of A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World and Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War
“This book is an historical landmark. Dittmer’s chronicle of civil rights health care workers is captivating. All of us need to appreciate these brave pioneers.”—Alvin F. Poussaint, M.D., Harvard Medical School
“The good doctors of John Dittmer's history of the Medical Committee for Human Rights labored at the crossroads of American medicine and American racism. Forty years later the nation chose for its President a Black man committed to universal health care, an incredible valedictory to the risky and humanistic work of the MCHR. The Good Doctors relates the beginning of that American journey, the story of health workers confronting a system hardwired to deliver second-class medicine to people of color. The Good Doctors is an important, dramatic and timely contribution to our understanding of racism in medicine and health equity in America.”—Fitzhugh Mullan, M.D., George Washington University
Library Journal
Emerging during the civil rights struggle in the South in the early 1960s, the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) suffered from a chronic identity crisis and continuous internal turmoil but still left a significant legacy. First providing support for civil rights workers, the many doctors, nurses, and others who were part of MCHR also challenged the American Medical Association's tolerance of racism in its affiliates, worked to desegregate and bring more equity to health care, and helped give rise to the widespread creation of community health centers. Disagreements over organizational structure and where MCHR's political focus should be led to its gradual dissolution in the 1980s. Dittmer (history, DePauw Univ.; Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi) uses interviews plus other primary and secondary sources to shed light on an organization that has remained largely unchronicled. Clearly presented and absorbing, this is recommended for public libraries as well as academic and medical libraries with medical history collections.
—Dick Maxwell