Integrating the city of medicine : Blacks in Philadelphia health care, 1910-1965 /

Surveying Philadelphia's black health-care community, McBride divides his study into three periods. In the years 1910 to 1945 racial prejudice isolated black health-care providers within their own community. Consequently, blacks developed their own hospitals and nursing schools. The first step toward integrating Philadelphia medicine was taken when black professionals began to gain employment in municipally run or supported tuberculosis clinics. This occurred mainly because of fear that black consumptives were transmitting the disease to whites. In the years 1945 to 1955 the great expansion of hospital care compelled hospital administrators to hire large numbers of blacks as nurses' aids, orderlies, cooks, and janitors. In the following decade, the civil rights movement opened up internships and staff appointments in the city's mainstream hospitals and medical institutions. It also hastened the demise of Philadelphia's self-enclosed black medical community but failed to significantly increase the supply of black physicians. McBride provides a competent study of an important and hitherto neglected subject. Academic and public library collections. -S. Galishoff, Georgia State University