“As one who personally experienced segregated health care,” says Judith Martin Cadore, M.D., “I do not want any of my patients to ever have to wonder if they are receiving the best possible care, feel too intimidated to ask questions, or be denied proper care because of their ethnic or economic backgrounds.”
JudyAnn Bigby, M.D., served as director of the Harvard Medical School Center of Excellence in Women’s Health and is nationally recognized for her pioneering work educating physicians on the provision of care to people with histories of substance abuse.
Harriet Bell Hayden, a prominent abolitionist and activist, sheltered freedom seekers in her home on Beacon Hill and dedicated her life to advocating for equal rights for all.
FBI agent in the 1970s
Dr. Dickens became the first African American woman admitted to American College of Surgeons in 1950.
Assistant surgeon general and rear admiral in the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service.
As a young medical student at Howard University College of Medicine from 1972 to 1976, Janet Mitchell saw patients from some of the poorest neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. Later, from 1976 to 1980, she served both her postgraduate internship and residency at New York’s Harlem Hospital Center. “Working at Harlem and doing almost all of my rotations in medical school at D.C. General Hospital, I said ‘there but by the grace of God—go I.’ I have ever since devoted myself to the underserved and the most disenfranchised.”
In 1984, Dr. Janice Douglas became the first woman promoted to or appointed to the rank of professor of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University Medical School.
In 1971, Dr. Jeanne Spurlock became the first African American and first woman to receive the Edward A. Strecker M.D. Award.
When Dr. Jeannette E. South-Paul was appointed chair of the University of Pittsburgh department of family medicine in 2001, she became the first woman and the first African American to serve as a permanent department chair at the university.