African American Doctors Of World War I

In World War I, 104 African American doctors joined the United States Army to care for the 40,000 men of the 92nd and 93rd Divisions, the Army's only black combat units. The infantry regiments of the 93rd arrived first and were turned over to the French to fill gaps in their decimated lines. The 92nd Division came later and fought alongside other American units. Some of those doctors rose to prominence; others died young or later succumbed to the economic and social challenges of the times. 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.

In April 1917, Congress approved President Woodrow Wilson’s request to declare war on the Central Powers, thrusting the United States into World War I with the rallying cry, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” Two months later 1,250 African American men—college graduates, businessmen, doctors, lawyers, reverends and non-commissioned officers—volunteered to become the first blacks to receive officer training at Fort Des Moines, Iowa. Denied the full privileges and protections of democracy at home, they prepared to defend it abroad in hopes that their service would be rewarded with equal citizenship at war’s end. This book tells the stories of these black American soldiers’ lives during training, in combat and after their return home. The author addresses issues of national and international racism and equality and discusses the Army’s use of African American troops, the creation of a segregated officer training camp, the war’s implications for civil rights in America, and military duty as an obligation of citizenship.

The "absorbing and powerful" (Wall Street Journal) story of two pioneering suffragette doctors who shattered social expectations and transformed modern medicine during World War I. A month after war broke out in 1914, doctors Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson set out for Paris, where they opened a hospital in a luxury hotel and treated hundreds of casualties plucked from France's battlefields. Although, prior to the war and the Spanish flu, female doctors were restricted to treating women and children, Flora and Louisa's work was so successful that the British Army asked them to set up a hospital in the heart of London. Nicknamed the Suffragettes' Hospital, Endell Street soon became known for its lifesaving treatments. In No Man's Land, Wendy Moore illuminates this turbulent moment of global war and pandemic when women were, for the first time, allowed to operate on men. Their fortitude and brilliance serve as powerful reminders of what women can achieve against all odds.

Glimpsing Modernity is a collection of papers presented at the US Army Medical Museum-sponsored conference on medical aspects of the First World War held in San Antonio, Texas, in February 2012. It captures the metamorphosis of military medicine during the war in a series of inter-related vignettes. Some of these stories provide new and insightful interpretations of known military medical themes, while others depart from these to examine less well-known, but truly important medical topics.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.

The autobiography of a black doctor in white Mississippi during the Jim Crow era and the fierce struggle for civil rights

In 1748, as yellow fever raged in Charleston, South Carolina, doctor John Lining remarked, "There is something very singular in the constitution of the Negroes, which renders them not liable to this fever." Lining's comments presaged ideas about blackness that would endure in medical discourses and beyond. In this fascinating medical history, Rana A. Hogarth examines the creation and circulation of medical ideas about blackness in the Atlantic World during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She shows how white physicians deployed blackness as a medically significant marker of difference and used medical knowledge to improve plantation labor efficiency, safeguard colonial and civic interests, and enhance control over black bodies during the era of slavery. Hogarth refigures Atlantic slave societies as medical frontiers of knowledge production on the topic of racial difference. Rather than looking to their counterparts in Europe who collected and dissected bodies to gain knowledge about race, white physicians in Atlantic slaveholding regions created and tested ideas about race based on the contexts in which they lived and practiced. What emerges in sharp relief is the ways in which blackness was reified in medical discourses and used to perpetuate notions of white supremacy.