In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • African American and Cherokee Nurses in Appalachia: A History, 1900–1965by Phoebe Ann Pollitt
  • Michael Blum
African American and Cherokee Nurses in Appalachia: A History, 1900–1965. By Phoebe Ann Pollitt. Contributions to Southern Appalachian Studies. (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2016. Pp. xii, 228. Paper, $35.00, ISBN 978-0-7864-7965-8.)

African American and Cherokee Nurses in Appalachia: A History, 1900-1965is an overview of African American and Cherokee nurses’ contributions to Appalachian health care that challenges several common misconceptions, including the African American absence from Appalachian history and the idea that neither group contributed to medical history. Phoebe Ann Pollitt, a professor of nursing, argues that “Appalachian African American [and Cherokee] nurses, working with other African American health care professionals, various community leaders, and occasional white allies, provided health care, managed nursing schools, and built professional nursing organizations throughout the Jim Crow era” (p. 1). The first section offers historical background on relevant topics, including the African American population in Appalachia and Appalachian health statistics. The second section gives a state-by-state breakdown of the history of African American and Cherokee nurses in the Appalachian regions of Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, the Qualla Boundary, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. Throughout the region, segregated health-care facilities and nursing schools received insufficient funding and had poor facilities. As a result, many of the clinics closed quickly. Pollitt offers biographies of individual nurses to demonstrate their efforts to improve [End Page 200]health care in their communities. On the whole, the book explains current Appalachian health-care disparities.

Pollitt is at her best when she demonstrates that nursing offered opportunities to fight Jim Crow. For example, throughout the 1940s and 1950s black nurses from the American Nurses Association (ANA) and the Old Dominion Nurses Association wrote letters of protest and applied to be members of the all-white Virginia Nurses Association. These efforts, combined with threats from the ANA, led the Virginia association to integrate. Readers are, however, left wanting more analysis of the way the nursing profession and nurses’ everyday interactions with their community challenged the status quo.

Despite being more informational than analytical, the book fills several historiographical holes. It adds to the scant literature on African Americans in Appalachian history. While several books exist, namely John C. Inscoe’s edited collection, Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation(Lexington, Ky., 2001), none focus on nursing or health care. Studies on African American nurses, including Darlene Clark Hine’s Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890-1950(Bloomington, Ind., 1989), overlook nursing in Appalachia. Works on health care in Appalachia either omit African Americans and Cherokees entirely or, as in Sandra Lee Barney’s Authorized to Heal: Gender, Class, and the Transformation of Medicine in Appalachia, 1880-1930(Chapel Hill, 2000), detail the conflict between physicians and lay healers, relegating nurses to the background. Pollitt builds on these works to demonstrate that African American and Cherokee nurses played a vital part in serving their communities.

The book is well sourced. The author’s reading of multiple secondary literatures positions her argument to add to the African American, Appalachian, and medical historiographies, while providing historical context. She uses local histories to support the state-by-state evaluation found in the second section. The wide range of primary sources, including oral histories and hospital newsletters, details the nurses and the segregated health-care institutions they worked in, which informs and enlivens the narrative.

Overall, Pollitt ably documents an understudied facet of African American, Cherokee, and Appalachian history. Her work serves as an excellent starting point for historians interested in further research in health care, race, or poverty and their intersection in Appalachia.

Michael Blum
Jarvis Christian College

pdf

Share