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Herbs to Lasers, Cholera to AIDS: African American Medicine and Health, 1800-2000
For two centuries, the health of African Americans in Central Virginia has been poor compared to the health of whites. Blacks have consistently had higher disease and death rates than whites, and over the years many African Americans have experienced the poverty, stress, and other environmental factors that cause disease.
As sanitation, health education, and health care have improved, treatments for disease have changed and have become more available. Public health programs have played an important role, as has integration, which has brought more and more African Americans into the health professions.
The Legacy Museum's first exhibit traces changes in African American medicine and health in Central Virginia, from before the Civil War until the present day.
In antebellum Virginia, African Americans and whites had the same diseases and received the same treatments, but beliefs about medical differences between blacks and whites were used to justify slavery.
African Americans, nearly half the population of Virginia, passed down remedies made from plants and used charms and medicines from African tradition. African American midwives delivered white babies as well as black.
During the Civil War, Lynchburg’s slaves, who served as nurses, cooks, laundry workers, and attendants, kept the city’s military hospitals going.
The post-Civil-War period saw the founding of schools to train black doctors and nurses.
After the Civil War, formal education in medicine became available to African
Americans with the founding of black medical and nursing schools. For the next
century, health education and health care remained segregated.
In Lynchburg, African American doctors, excluded from hospital medicine, were limited to general office practice in black neighborhoods. Black neighborhoods and schools were also served by public health nurses who worked for the Lynchburg Health Department, established in 1910. County health departments were established at about the same time.
Central Virginia’s black doctors and nurses faithfully cared for a community in which disease and death rates remained higher for blacks than for whites.
After World War II, the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education and the Civil Rights movement that followed it changed health care as well as the rest of society. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 legislation creating Medicare and Medicaid brought the divided health system together.
Today, African Americans' disease and mortality rates are still higher than those of whites, and the number of African Americans in the health professions, though growing, is still relatively low.
Because the presence of black health professionals in a medical facility makes blacks more willing to seek treatment there, getting African Americans to enter the health professions is crucial to improving health care for all African Americans.
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