Guides: PAH DEI Resource Highlights: Black History Month

From the National Library of Medicine

Opening Doors: Contemporary African American Academic Surgeons
This exhibition celebrates the achievements of African American pioneers in medicine by highlighting past and contemporary surgeons and educators who exemplify excellence in their fields and foster future excellence through the education and mentoring of young African Americans pursuing medical careers.
Binding Wounds, Pushing Boundaries: African Americans in Civil War Medicine
Many histories have been written about medical care during the American Civil War, but the participation and contributions of African Americans as nurses, surgeons and hospital workers have often been overlooked. Binding Wounds, Pushing Boundaries: African Americans in Civil War Medicine looks at the men and women who served as surgeons and nurses and how their work as medical providers challenged the prescribed notions of race and gender.

Black Clinicians Biographies and Autobiographies

Twice As Hard: the stories of Black women who fought to become physicians, from the Civil War to the 21st Century by Jasmine Brown
Call Number: WZ 150 B878t 2023
ISBN: 9780807025086
Publication Date: 2023
Print available PAH Library
American Sirens: The incredible story of the black men who became America's first paramedics by Kevin Hazzard
Call Number: RA 645.6.P4 H39 2022
ISBN: 9780306926075
Publication Date: 2022
The extraordinary story of an unjustly forgotten group of Black men in Pittsburgh who became the first paramedics in America, saving lives and changing the course of emergency medicine around the world.

Print copy available Van Pelt Library
Aaron Mcduffie Moore by Blake Hill-Saya; G. K. Butterfield (Foreword by); C. Eileen Watts Welch (Afterword by)
Call Number: R154.M725 H55 2020
ISBN: 9781469655857
Publication Date: 2020
Learn about Dr. Moore, the first practicing African American physician in the city of Durham, North Carolina who went on to establish the Durham Drug Company and the Durham Colored Library; spearhead and run Lincoln Hospital, the city's first secular, freestanding African American hospital; cofound North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company; help launch Rosenwald schools for African American children statewide; and foster the development of Durham's Hayti community.

Print copy available Van Pelt Library
African American Doctors of World War I by W. Douglas Fisher; Joann H. Buckley
Call Number: D629.U6 F57 2016
ISBN: 9781476663159
Publication Date: 2016
Beginning with their assignment to the Medical Officers Training Camp (Colored)--the only one in U.S. history--this book covers the early years, education and war experiences of these physicians, as well as their careers in the black communities of early 20th century America.

Print copy available Van Pelt Library
The Tuskegee Veterans Hospital and Its Black Physicians by Mary Kaplan
Call Number: UH474.5. T87 K37 2016
ISBN: 9781476662985
Publication Date: 2016
This book describes the effort to integrate the Tuskegee Veteran's Hospital and follows the careers of the small group of well-trained, dedicated black physicians who played significant roles in its development as a treatment center for black veterans. The hospital's contributions to research and medicine are documented, along with its involvement in one of the biggest scandals in medical research--the Tuskegee syphilis study.

Print copy available Van Pelt Library
Black Man in a White Coat by Damon Tweedy
Call Number: R154.T84 A3 2015
ISBN: 9781250044631
Publication Date: 2015
One doctor's passionate and profound memoir of his experience grappling with race, bias, and the unique health problems of black Americans.

Print copy available Van Pelt Library
She Can Bring Us Home: Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, Civil Rights Pioneer by Diane Kiesel
Call Number: E185.97 F39 K54 2015
ISBN: 9781612345055
Publication Date: 2015
Long before it became the slogan of the presidential campaign for Barack Obama, Dorothy Ferebee (1898-1980) lived by the motto YES, WE CAN. An African American obstetrician and civil rights activist from Washington DC, she was descended from lawyers, journalists, politicians, and a judge. At a time when African Americans faced Jim Crow segregation, desperate poverty, and lynch mobs, she advised presidents on civil rights and assisted foreign governments on public health issues.

Electronic book - Unlimited users
Print copy available Van Pelt Library
In Search of Mary Seacole: The Making of a Cultural Icon by Helen Rappaport
Call Number: RT37.S43 R37 2022
ISBN: 9781398504431
Publication Date: 2022
Print copy available Van Pelt Library
Breaking Ground by Louis W. Sullivan; David Chanoff (As told to); Andrew Young (Foreword by)
Call Number: R695.S85 2014
ISBN: 0820346934
Publication Date: 2014
In Breaking Ground, Sullivan recounts his extraordinary life beginning with his childhood in Jim Crow south Georgia and continuing through his trailblazing endeavors training to become a physician in an almost entirely white environment in the Northeast, founding and then leading the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, and serving as secretary of Health and Human Services in President George H. W. Bush's administration.

Electronic copy - Unlimited users
Print copy available Van Pelt Library
Beside the Troubled Waters: A Black Doctor Remembers Life, Medicine, and Civil Rights in an Alabama town by Sonnie Wellington Hereford; Jack D. Ellis; Sonnie Wellington Hereford
Call Number: R695. H47 2011
ISBN: 0817385061
Publication Date: 2011
Beside the Troubled Waters is a memoir by an African American physician in Alabama whose story in many ways typifies the lives and careers of black doctors in the south during the segregationist era while also illustrating the diversity of the black experience in the medical profession.

Electronic copy - unlimited users
Print copy available Van Pelt Library
The Notorious Dr. Flippin: Abortion and Consequence in the Early Twentieth Century by Jamie Q. Tallman; Harriet Washington (Foreword by)
Call Number: HQ767.5.U5 T35 2011
ISBN: 9780896726758
Publication Date: 2011
The first book to focus exclusively on attitudes towards abortion in early twentieth-century rural communities, The Notorious Dr. Flippin supplies long overlooked context for current debate and enriches studies of African American, western, women's, and medical history.

Print copy available Van Pelt Library

The Pact (2008) Produced and Directed by Andrea Kalin; Producer, Silivia R. Holmes
The Pact is the provocative true-life story of three friends from a rough Newark, New Jersey neighborhood. Rameck Hunt, Sampson Davis, and George Jenkins made a pact in high school to find a way to go to college and then medical school. The three doctors not only accomplished this, but they are now spreading the word to inspire other inner-city kids to stay off the streets and take the educational route to a better life.

Black Physicians Struggle for Civil Rights: Edward C. Mazique, MD by Florence Ridlon
Call Number: R695.M35 R53 2005
ISBN: 0826333397
Publication Date: 2005
This biography traces the career of an African American physician and civil rights advocate, Edward Craig Mazique (1911-1987), from the poverty and discrimination of Natchez, Mississippi, to his status as a prominent physician in Washington, D.C.

Electronic copy - unlimited access
Print copy available Van Pelt Library
Beaches, Blood and Ballots: A Black Doctor's Civil Rights Struggle by Gilbert R. Mason; James Patterson Smith
Call Number: F349.B5 M37 2000
ISBN: 1578062780
Publication Date: 2000
A frontline memoir from the Biloxi physician who fought to bring civil rights justice to the Mississippi Gulf Coast This book, the first to focus on the integration of the Gulf Coast, is Dr. Gilbert R. Mason's eyewitness account of harrowing episodes that occurred there during the civil rights movement.

Print copy available Van Pelt Library
Make a Difference by Henry W. Foster
Call Number: R154.F714 A3 1997
ISBN: 0684826852
Publication Date: 1997
Touching on his lifelong work with at-risk teens, Dr. Foster presents a prescriptive program of "preventive medicine" to counter teen alcohol and drug abuse, poverty, violent crime, low self-esteem and other problems that plague America's children today.
Joycelyn Elders, M. D.: From Sharecropper's Daught to Surgeon General of the United States of America by M. Joycelyn Elders; David Chanoff
Call Number: R154.E48 A3 1996
ISBN: 0688147224
Publication Date: 1996
Dr. Elders graduated from the University of Arkansas Medical School and then became its first black resident, its first black chief resident, and finally its first black professor. By the time of the Senate debate on her confirmation as surgeon general in August 1993, Dr. Elders had been a respected pediatric endocrinologist and medical scientist for a quarter of a century, as well as the director of Arkansas's health department under then-governor Clinton.

Print copy available Van Pelt Library
One Blood: The Death and Resurrection of Charles R. Drew by Spencie Love
ISBN: 0807822507
Publication Date: 1996
One Blood traces both the life of the famous black surgeon and blood plasma pioneer Dr. Charles Drew and the well-known legend about his death.

Electronic copy - unlimited users
African-American Medical Pioneers by Charles H. Epps; David G. Johnson; Audrey L. Vaughan
Call Number: R695. E67 1994
ISBN: 0941406466
Publication Date: 1994
Print copy available Van Pelt Library and Holman Biotech Commons
Integrating the City of Medicine: Blacks in Philadelphia Health Care, 1910-1965 by David McBride
Call Number: R315 M19 1989
ISBN: 9780877225461
Publication Date: 1989
Traces the structural development and social and political experiences of one urban community of black medical providers during a period of unprecedented change in health care, race relations, and politics. This work also reveals the origins and influence of black medical professionals and allied health workers in Philadelphia.

Print copy available PAH Library, Holman Biotech Commons, and Van Pelt Library
Charles Richard Drew: The Man and the Myth by Charles E. Wynes
Call Number: RD27.35.D74 W96 1988
ISBN: 0252015517
Publication Date: 1988
Print copy available Van Pelt Library

University of Pennsylvania Special Collections

Mercy-Douglass Hospital records - Philadelphia Area Archives (upenn.edu)

The Mercy-Douglass Hospital was an African-American hospital and the first black nurse training school in in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It existed from 1895-1960. This collection contains the institutional records of Mercy-Douglass, along with over 200 photographs of the hospital and nursing school.

Searching the Literature

Over the past few years, medical librarians have been exceptionally vocal about the use of outdated and offensive terms in the Medical Subject Headings vocabulary particularly in the Persons branch. Concerns have also been raised regarding absent terms and lack of specificity for certain population groups. Advocacy and discussion continue and are being led by Medical Library Association members and the Board of Directors.

With this in mind, below are suggested controlled vocabulary terms to include in PubMed or other MEDLINE platform searches on Black health.

Black People - MeSH - NCBI (nih.gov)

Black or African American - MeSH - NCBI (nih.gov) - this term is nested under "Black People"[MeSH]. If you leave the default to explode the MeSH tree in your PubMed search, Black or African American will also be included.

Many databases will have an indexed controlled vocabulary term for Black People and/or African Americans. Below are some examples from commonly queried biomedical and allied health databases.

Controlled Vocabulary Terms by Database
Database	Controlled Vocabulary Term
Medline (PubMed)	MeSH - "Black People" MeSH - "Black or African American"
Embase (Elsevier)	Emtree - 'Black person' Emtree - 'African American' Emtree - ' African Brazilian' Emtree - 'African Caribbean'
CINAHL (EBSCO)	CINAHL Subject Headings - "Black Persons" CINAHL Subject Headings - "African Americans"