9781422283288

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he statistics are troubling: African-American men are more than twice as likely to die of prostate cancer as their white counterparts, and black women almost twice as likely to succumb to breast cancer as women of other races. The mortality rate for black infants is twice that of whites, and blacks, on the whole, are several times more likely than whites to suffer from high blood pressure and diabetes. Some experts think that in addition to the obvious rea- sons—such as higher poverty levels, lack of insurance, and reduced access to nutritious food choices in black commu- nities—a major culprit might be a shortage of black med- ical personnel. They point out that surveys have shown that black patients tend to feel more comfortable with black doctors and are more likely to seek needed treatment if they have access to a physician of color. (Geography also becomes a factor; black doctors are more likely to set up their offices in low-income areas, where choices for medical care are few and far between.) While it seems that the easy answer would be to train greater numbers of black doctors, the path tomedical school has not traditionally been an easy one for aspiring, young people of color. The very first African-American man to earn a medical degree, James McCune Smith (1813-1865), had to travel to Europe to do so. The situation improved only gradually. In 1868, the College of Medicine at the historically black Howard University opened in Washington, D.C., and in

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Black Achievement in Science: Medicine