USA.
Harvard University, Massachusetts, USA.
J Hist Med Allied Sci. 2024 Apr 2;79(2):129-142. doi: 10.1093/jhmas/jrad048.
In a profession shaped by Whiteness and masculinity, the few Black women physicians who earned medical degrees prior to the Second World War found some of their rare professional opportunities in public health. Though their choices were often constrained by racism and sexism, they embraced public health work as a means of carrying out their "mission" in marginalized communities and as a way of practicing medicine with a more expansive definition than treating individual patients or illnesses. Black women physicians shaped public health by creating unique programming to meet the needs of the communities they served, including mobile health clinics and community health weeks. The first Black women physicians who worked in public health in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries applied the new tool of public health "vital" statistics to Black lives and questioned the limits of their utility when created by White practitioners with racial biases. In the 1930s, some Black women physicians began earning some of the first master's degrees in public health, just as the field was beginning to professionalize. Throughout the twentieth century, Black women physicians pioneered community health programming and, though born from exclusionary policies that limited where they could practice, experimented with alternative clinical spaces, even as the hospital and laboratory became the primary sites of medicine for White clinicians. By embracing public health, Black women physicians shaped the field and used it as a tool to address racial health disparities in the communities they served, acting on their belief that Black health could be improved, thereby contesting notions of biological inferiority.
在一个由白人男性主导的职业中，少数在第二次世界大战前获得医学学位的黑人女医生在公共卫生领域找到了一些难得的职业机会。尽管她们的选择常常受到种族主义和性别歧视的限制，但她们将公共卫生工作视为在边缘化社区中履行“使命”的一种手段，也是一种比治疗个体患者或疾病更广泛的行医方式。黑人女医生通过创建独特的项目来满足她们所服务社区的需求，塑造了公共卫生领域，其中包括流动医疗诊所和社区卫生周。19 世纪和 20 世纪初，第一批从事公共卫生工作的黑人女医生将公共卫生的新工具“生命”统计数据应用于黑人的生活，并质疑了这些数据在由带有种族偏见的白人从业者创建时的有效性。20 世纪 30 年代，一些黑人女医生开始获得第一批公共卫生硕士学位，而此时该领域正开始专业化。整个 20 世纪，黑人女医生开创了社区卫生项目，尽管这些项目源于限制她们行医地点的排他性政策，但她们尝试了替代的临床空间，即使医院和实验室成为白人临床医生的主要医疗场所。通过接受公共卫生，黑人女医生塑造了这个领域，并将其作为解决她们所服务社区的种族健康差距的工具，她们坚信黑人的健康可以得到改善，从而挑战了生物劣势的观念。
