Better Late Than Never

The American Medical Association has finally said, “We’re sorry.”

In a move to improve its relationship with minority physicians, the AMA issued a formal apology last month for its history of racial inequality toward African American doctors. In particular, the AMA apologized for excluding black physicians from its membership, for listing black doctors as “colored,” and for failing to speak against federal funding of segregated hospitals.

The AMA’s apology followed on the heels of a report published by a panel it convened to investigate the historical racial divide in organized medicine. According to the report, the AMA was “early and persistent in countenacing racial segregation” characterized by the open discrimination against black physicians. The report also concludes “the legacy of segregation, bias, and exclusion continues to adversely affect African American physicians and the patients they serve.”

The National Medical Association immediately accepted the apology, issuing a press release noting that the NMA “owes its very existence, in part, to these inequities which forced African American physicians to found their own membership organization.” Nelson L. Adams, president of the NMA, urged the AMA to join forces with his organization on several initiatives aimed at improving healthcare for all races.

The NMA was founded in 1895 in response to the AMA’s discrimination, but you don’t have to look back that far to see blatant segregation in the medical community. In fact, as Dawn Turner Rice wrote recently, 54 of Chicago’s 57 hospitals didn’t allow black physicians to have attending status until 1964.

Another important read: Harriet Washington, a member of the AMA-appointed panel that produced the report on the racial divide in medicine, wrote an essay for the New York Times on racial barriers in medicine. Washington examines the AMA’s “wrongs” throughout the twentieth century — including the organization’s failure to support the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Washington ends her essay with a mind-boggling statistic. In 1910, 2.5% of doctors in the United States were African American. The same figure in 2008? Just 2.2%. It’s not exactly the progress one might expect over the course of a century, but maybe the AMA’s apology will prove to be a good first step.