Learning About Sickle Cell: The Patient in Early Sickle Cell Disease Case Reports, 1910-1933.

Case reports of sickle cell disease (SCD) from its discovery in 1910 to 1933 provide glimpses into the disease's impact on patients and families. Attending physicians, trying to understand the pathophysiology of and treatments for this newly recognized disease, reported also on the effect of SCD on patients' ability to attend school, play, and work, the kinds and severity of the pain patients endured, the late onset of puberty and slowed development of secondary sex characteristics, and the ways families dealt with loved ones who had the disease. These anonymous patients and families helped "teach" physicians about SCD in the early years after its discovery.

Use of the Word "Crisis" in Sickle Cell Disease: The Language of Sickle Cell.

Language matters. The words used to name and describe disease phenomena are a reflection of society. The authors address the use of the word "crisis" in SCD from sociological, historical, medical, and patient perspectives.

Tracking down the first recorded sickle cell patient in Western medicine.

In 1910, the first article describing a case of sickle cell anemia appeared in Archives of Internal Medicine. In 1987, a historian of African American medical history, Todd Savitt, took advantage of an opportunity to research the circumstances behind the publication of that first article and identify the people (patient and physicians) involved. Savitt recounts his "adventures" in tracing the story to its origins in the West Indies.

The Journal of the National Medical Association 100 years ago: a new voice of and for African American physicians.

Volume 1 of the Journal of the National Medical Association (JNMA), published quarterly during 1909, included a good deal of space devoted to 2 key concerns: (1) building and unifying black health professionals in medicine, surgery, dentistry, and pharmacy; and (2) providing a voice for these African American health professionals to the often-hostile and racist larger world of medicine. The Journal's editor, Charles Victor Roman, and associate editor, John A. Kenney, were well suited to the task.

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.