CHAPTER XIV
THE MEDICAL EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO
The medical care of the negro race will never be wholly left to negro physicians. Nevertheless, if the negro can be brought to feel a sharp responsibility for the physical integrity of his people, the outlook for their mental and moral improvement will be distinctly brightened. The practice of the negro doctor will be limited to his own race, which in its turn will be cared for better by good negro physicians than by poor white ones. But the physical well-being of the negro is not only of moment to the negro himself. Ten million of them live in close contact with sixty million whites. Not only does the negro himself suffer from hookworm and tuberculosis; he communicates them to his white neighbors. Precisely as the ignorant and unfortunate white contaminates him. Self-protection not less than humanity offers weighty counsel in this matter; self-interest seconds philanthropy. The negro must be educated not only for his sake, but for ours. He is, as far as human eye can see, a permanent factor in the nation. He has his rights and due and value as an individual; but he has, besides, the tremendous importance that belongs to a potential source of infection and contagion.
The pioneer work in educating the race to know and to practise fundamental hygienic principles must be done largely by the negro doctor and the negro nurse. It is important that they both be sensibly and effectively trained at the level at which their services are now important. The negro is perhaps more easily "taken in" than the white; and as his means of extricating himself from a blunder are limited, it is all the more cruel to abuse his ignorance through any sort of pretense. A well-taught negro sanitarian will be immensely useful; an essentially untrained negro wearing an M.D. degree is dangerous.
Make-believe in the matter of negro medical schools is therefore intolerable. Even good intention helps but little to change their aspect. The negro needs good schools rather than many schools,—schools to which the more promising of the race can be sent to receive a substantial education in which hygiene rather than surgery, for example, is strongly accentuated. If at the same time these men can be imbued with the missionary spirit so that they will look upon the diploma as a commission to serve their people humbly and devotedly, they may play an important part in the sanitation and civilization of the whole nation. Their duty calls them away from large cities to the village and the plantation, upon which light has hardly as yet begun to break.
Of the seven medical schools for negroes in the United States,[1] five are at this moment in no position to make any contribution of value to the solution of the problem
- ↑ Washington. D.C.: Howard University; New Orleans: Flint Medical College; Raleigh (N.C.): Leonard Medical School; Knoxville: Knoxville Medical College; Memphis: Medical Department of the University of West Tennessee; Nashville: Meharry Medical College; Louisville: National Medical College.
