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Hospitals, Black
Since the days of slavery, there have been a number of hospitals in the United States run solely for black patients. In the beginning, the majority of hospitals for blacks were started in the South by white slaveowners who wanted to protect their investments. That changed in March 1865 with the federal passage of the Freedmen's Bureau legislation, which placed some responsibility for black health care in the hands of the federal government.
That legislation mandated the establishment of ninety health care facilities for blacks throughout the South. However, once the Freedmen's Bureau bill expired in 1869, local communities were forced, where possible, to take responsibility for these facilities themselves, leaving many African Americans with virtually no access to health care services.
Black Hospitals for the Freed People
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, a number of hospitals founded to treat African American patients were established by charitable institutions with help from donations from philanthropists. The largest contributor to this cause was a Jewish philanthropist named Julius Rosenwald, who donated to black hospitals in several large cities in the North.
The first of these was the Provident Medical Center in Chicago, which opened its doors in 1891 as a result of the efforts of African American physician Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, a pioneer in the field of open-heart surgery. Next came the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital in Philadelphia, founded in 1907 by Dr. Nathan Mossell, the first African American graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. Among the black hospitals established in the South, Hubbard Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, was founded in 1911, and the Tuskegee Institute Hospital in Alabama was opened in 1913.
By 1900, there were forty black hospitals and eleven black medical schools in the United States. Yet by 1932, there was still only one black hospital for every 100,000 African Americans in the nation, which was the equivalent of one hospital bed for every 1,000 black patients (compared to one hospital bed for every 110 white patients). The realities of widespread segregation and lack of black hospitals contributed to black mortality being far higher than that of whites nationwide.
Dream Seekers
Charles B. Purvis
Dr. Charles B. Purvis, who began his career as a Union army nurse, graduated from Wigser College, which later became Case Western Reserve University, in 1867. Coming from an unusually affluent black family, Dr. Purvis refused to acknowledge the limitations of the period that could have prevented him from becoming a surgeon and establishing a black teaching hospital. He and Dr. Alexander T. Augusta were among the founders of the Howard University Medical School, where Dr. Purvis was a professor for more than thirty years.
In 1868, Dr. Purvis was appointed surgeon-in-chief of the Freedmen's Hospital, thus becoming the first African American to head a civilian hospital.
Evolution of the Black Hospital
A different kind of hospital for blacks evolved over time. These hospitals began as integrated facilities but eventually became all-black hospitals because of population shifts in the communities where they were located. The public hospital in Harlem is a good example of this; once an integrated hospital, it is now almost exclusively black—not by design but because the population of Harlem is primarily black.
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