Segregation, civil rights, and health disparities: the legacy of African American physicians and organized medicine, 1910-1968.

Between 1910 and 1968, the National Medical Association (NMA) repeatedly clashed with the American Medical Association (AMA) over the latter organization's racial bars to membership and other health policy issues. The NMA, founded in 1895 as a nonexclusionary medical society to provide a voice for disenfranchised black physicians and patients, struggled in its early years, during which AMA leadership took scant notice of it. But skirmishes ensued over such actions as stigmatizing racial labels in the AMA's American Medical Directory, which, beginning in 1906, listed all U.

Creating a segregated medical profession: African American physicians and organized medicine, 1846-1910.

An independent panel of experts, convened by the American Medical Association (AMA) Institute for Ethics, analyzed the roots of the racial divide within American medical organizations. In this, the first of a 2-part report, we describe 2 watershed moments that helped institutionalize the racial divide. The first occurred in the 1870s, when 2 medical societies from Washington, DC, sent rival delegations to the AMA's national meetings: an all-white delegation from a medical society that the US courts and Congress had formally censured for discriminating against black physicians; and an integrated delegation from a medical society led by physicians from Howard University.

African American physicians and organized medicine, 1846-1968: origins of a racial divide.

Like the nation as a whole, organized medicine in the United States carries a legacy of racial bias and segregation that should be understood and acknowledged. For more than 100 years, many state and local medical societies openly discriminated against black physicians, barring them from membership and from professional support and advancement. The American Medical Association was early and persistent in countenancing this racial segregation.

Xenotransplantation: a rational choice?

There are many potential benefits that xenotransplantation (cross-species transplantation) might afford us, but there are also many weighty biological hurdles which must be surmounted if this procedure is ever to become a clinical reality. Many of these biological concerns are being addressed by specific and novel therapies; however, we must still determine the point at which xenotransplantation could be considered safe enough for clinical implementation. Many members of the scientific community believe that we should strive to make xenotransplantation products as safe and effective as possible, whereas others argue that we should not need to optimize the safety and efficaciousness of xenotransplantation products for them to be deemed acceptable for human use.