In all regions of the United States, white American policy makers have historically neglected the health of minorities yet have used their high rates of death and disease to justify legalized ...segregation, immigration restriction, and other overt forms of racial and ethnic discrimination. What are the historical origins of health disparities, how did they change during the course of the twentieth century, and what caused them to improve or worsen? When, why, and how did the federal government begin to address racial and regional disparities in health as a national problem?
Until at least the Progressive Era, the South was
Abraham Flexner and early black reformers such as John A. Kenney, Eugene Dibble, Numa P. Adams, Midian O. Bousfield, Louis Wright, and Paul Cornely led the early twentieth-century efforts to improve ...black and southern medical education. In 1942, after the Rosenwald, General Education Board, and Carnegie philanthropies terminated their support for Meharry Medical College in Nashville, the school’s white and black representatives as well as white southern policy makers began to seek tax support from southern state governments. These two groups advocated the use of public funds to maximize the number of black M.D. graduates but mutually agreed to sidestep
At the same time that Thomas Parran, Lister Hill, Claude Pepper, Michael M. Davis, and Louis Wright pursued national health reform, southern state officials began to accept responsibility for ...equalizing public services for blacks with regard to health and welfare spending. Not only in the American South but in every industrialized nation, the seemingly unlimited promise of medical science released a torrent of public and private funding to increase the supply of medical services by training medical professionals, building and equipping hospitals, and multiplying the number and scope of research laboratories. Southern efforts, substantially aided by federal funding, were motivated
North Carolina’s position as a regional and national leader in public health resulted from several unique resources, particularly the state’s visionary health reformers. The State Board of Health was ...led by some of the nation’s most progressive public health leaders, John A. Ferrell, Watson Smith Rankin, and Carl V. Reynolds.
John Ferrell began his career as a county health officer during the 1900s. Under Rankin, Ferrell served as North Carolina’s assistant secretary of health and as the state director of the hookworm campaign, advancing to become Wickliffe Rose’s second in command at the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission. North Carolina’s antihookworm program
