What’s the story?
Eliza Anna Grier was an African American who graduated from Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP) in 1897. In 1901 Grier was practicing medicine in South Carolina and struggling to maintain her practice while battling her own health issues.Although the Emancipation Proclamation freed all Confederate enslaved people in 1863, the following decades were rife with racism and racial inequality. A set of formal and informal social and legal policies throughout the Southern United States called the “Jim Crow” laws enforced racial segregation and continued to deny Black people their full rights as American citizens.
Jim Crow segregation also applied to hospitals, medical care, and medical education. Hospitals sometimes had separate wards for black patients, but often would not accept black patients at all, let alone employ black doctors and nurses. Black doctors struggled to train as physicians and to acquire the resources and positions required to treat other Blacks. It was especially hard for Black women physicians, who struggled against both racial and gender discrimination.
Once they graduated, early Black women doctors faced difficulties establishing their professional careers and gaining experience. At least into the 1920s, available hospital positions were limited to the few black-owned and operated hospitals around the country. Although male Black physicians had established these hospitals and nurse training schools to meet patient needs and provide jobs for Black doctors, this did not guarantee employment opportunities for female Black physicians. The small number of positions at these facilities was largely filled by male Black doctors.
Due to the limited opportunities for black female physicians to practice medicine, and the shortage of doctors in poor minority communities, many early Black women physicians created their own opportunities. These women established their own hospitals, clinics, and dispensaries in poor, primarily Black communities in the rural South and in the urban northeast. Black women physicians took a public health approach to patient care that included not only medical treatment, but health education, good nutrition, clean and safe living conditions, and improved economic conditions.
More details
theme: Unfinished Revolutionssubjects: African American women physicians; Anthony, Susan B.; Education; Civil rights; Correspondence; Grier, Eliza Anna; Newspaper clippings; Photographs; Racism in medical education; Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania
contributing repository: Drexel University College of Medicine Legacy Center
submitted by: Staff member
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