Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America

3. “I Studied and Practiced Medicine without Molestation”: African American Doctors in the First Years of Freedom

3 “I Studied and Practiced Medicine without Molestation” African American Doctors in the First Years of Freedom GRETCHEN LONG 43 in the earliest years of freedom, African Americans with hopes of becoming professional doctors faced a complex dilemma, perhaps more complex than most historians have recognized. Although many freedmen had practiced healing as slaves, by and large they had no formal medical education and no means of gaining one. In this respect, aspiring black doctors faced obstacles similar to those faced by African Americans trying to advance in education, land ownership, employment , and politics. In these areas, and in others, the end of slavery was followed by de facto and de jure racism that barred access to the professions and often to meaningful citizenship. Historians such as Vanessa Northington Gamble have rightly identified this racism as the key force in barring African American doctors, dentists, and nurses from the medical profession in the decades after emancipation. In contrast to fields such as law and education, however, the medical field was also beset by complications that were distinct from racism. In the years immediately after the Civil War, not only the recently freed African Americans but American medicine itself stood at a critical juncture. In the decades before the Civil War, Americans had lived in a diverse medical landscape. Radically different types of health care, administered by many types of practitioners, and contradictory ideas about the nature of health and illness competed for patients and prestige. However, the Civil War brought about advances in medicine , especially in surgery and infection control. The Confederate and Union armies screened their doctors to ensure and regulate quality of care, favoring doctors of allopathic medicine. After the war, authorities held practitioners of other types of medicine in low esteem and 44 GRETCHEN LONG barred herbalists, homeopaths, hydropaths, and the like from professional status. The twin forces of racism and newly rigid professional standards worked powerfully in the lives of African American doctors and patients. Legacies of slavery and the vexed history of American medical practice challenged aspiring black doctors as they navigated the new terrain of both freedom and doctorhood. Two African American healers—John Donalson of Austin, Texas and Moses Camplin of Charleston, South Carolina—appear sporadically in government records and correspondence in the early decades of emancipation.These documents throw light on the effect of changes in medicine on the ambitions of African American doctors. Their stories are remarkable in that we otherwise have few sources from this generation of black doctors, whose lives span both slavery and freedom. The experiences of these two doctors as they attempted to set up practice illustrate a number of struggles between authority, both medical and governmental, and free African Americans in the years immediately after the Civil War. They point to how the politics of race and the politics of medicine, both in periods of flux, intertwined in sites around the country. John Donalson and Moses Camplin tried, in the first years of freedom, to harness their new free status to a new professional status of physician.This coupling met with a tangle of success and failure and, for the historian, illustrates the intersection of a number of questions about racism on one hand and about the struggle over competing bodies of medical knowledge on the other. Donalson and Camplin’s stories survive because their letters and letters about them are preserved in the archives of the national office of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Although health care was not part of the Bureau’s original mandate, during Reconstruction some of its administrators in the various geographic districts took on limited responsibility for the medical care of former slaves. Doctors working for the Freedmen’s Bureau adhered to the medical methods of the Union army, eschewing the homeopathic and herbal medicine that had coexisted with allopathic medicine before the war. In the eyes of the Bureau, supporting the claim of a practitioner of alternative medicine would conflict with its assigned role of lifting the freedpeople out of superstition and into enlightened practices.This aspect of the Bureau’s work proved important for John Donalson and Moses Camplin.1 “I STUDIED AND PRACTICED MEDICINE” 45 Although both Donalson and Camplin called themselves doctors or physicians and, as far as the records show, were called and thought of as doctors by their communities, dissimilarities in the two men’s training and background, their relationships with local black...