The Good Doctors: The Medical Committee for Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice in Health CareIn the summer of 1964 medical professionals, mostly white and northern, organized the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) to provide care and support for civil rights activists organizing black voters in Mississippi. They left their lives and lucrative private practices to march beside and tend the wounds of demonstrators from Freedom Summer, the March on Selma, and the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. Galvanized and sometimes radicalized by their firsthand view of disenfranchised communities, the MCHR soon expanded its mission to encompass a range of causes from poverty to the war in Vietnam. They later took on the whole of the United States healthcare system. MCHR doctors soon realized fighting segregation would mean not just caring for white volunteers, but also exposing and correcting shocking inequalities in segregated health care. They pioneered community health plans and brought medical care to underserved or unserved areas. Though education was the most famous battleground for integration, the appalling injustice of segregated health care levelled equally devastating consequences. Award-winning historian John Dittmer, author of the classic civil rights history Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, has written an insightful and moving account of a group of idealists who put their careers in the service of the motto “Health Care Is a Human Right.” |
Contents
| 1 | |
1 The Good Doctors | 18 |
2 Freedom Summer in Mississippi | 38 |
3 The Medical Arm of the Civil Rights Movement | 61 |
4 Selma and Jackson | 85 |
5 Summer 1965 | 110 |
6 The Last March | 130 |
7 The War at Home | 157 |
9 The Young Turks | 205 |
10 Health Care Is a Human Right | 229 |
11 Years of Decline | 251 |
Coda | 265 |
The MCHR Legacy | 273 |
Acknowledgments | 283 |
Notes | 285 |
| 313 | |
Other editions - View all
The Good Doctors: The Medical Committee for Human Rights and the Struggle ... John Dittmer No preview available - 2009 |
Common terms and phrases
Aaron active African American Alvin Poussaint antiwar became black doctors black physicians Bob Smith Bogalusa Bronston campaign Chicago civil rights movement civil rights workers clinic COFO Committee for Human Communist community health center convention delegates Delta Ministry demonstrators director Disparti Dittmer federal Fitzhugh Mullan Freedom Summer funds Governing Council health care health insurance Health Rights Holmes County hospital Human Rights Ibid Jack Geiger Jackson Jackson office Johnny Parham July June Finer Kennedy later leaders Levin March marchers MCHR MCHR doctors MCHR members MCHR volunteers MCHR's Medical Committee medical school medical students medicine meeting Mississippi Moldovan Mound Bayou NAACP national health national office Negro nurses organization patients Phyllis Cunningham physicians police political Poussaint president problems professionals protest public health Quentin Young racial Report Robert Smith Schnall Selma Sept Shirley SNCC social South southern staff Stokely Carmichael University Vietnam Walter Lear Washington York