Long Waits, Small Spaces, and Compassionate Care: Memories of Race and Medicine in a Mid-Twentieth Century Southern Community

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Abstract
Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74.1 (2000) 107-137 While speaking in 1996 about her past medical experiences in Greenville, Mississippi, Lillie Mae Shanklin, an African-American nurse, recalled that working at a black hospital with white physicians in the 1940s was "just wonderful." She went on to praise physicians and nurses who listened to patients and took into consideration their feelings when providing medical care. And yet she also described the long waits faced by African-American patients at the then-segregated medical clinics and public hospital. She knew that hospital desegregation took so long to occur because "they didn't want to mix us"--even though African-American and white physicians, nurses, and patients interacted daily in very intimate ways. 1 The white obstetrician and gynecologist Robert Bledsoe presented himself in his oral memories as a skillful physician whose medical work was needed and appreciated by black patients: "Black people made me a living," he said, because "the black people knew who practiced good medicine." 2 Shanklin and other African Americans articulated [End Page 107] their memories as two separate stories--one recalling professional medicine's personal attention, the other recalling its racial inequity. In contrast, the oral memories of white care-givers, such as Bledsoe, used race to emphasize the compassion, integrity, and value of their work, thus avoiding the history of medicine's discriminatory practices. The medical realm's particular mixture of concern for the well-being of both the individual and the community, its focus on the body, and the stress of sickness and death makes it a fascinating and important setting for the examination of race relations. Few places other than hospitals and doctors' offices involve such a high degree of intimacy characterized by such intense feelings, ranging from pain and anxiety to joy and triumph. As Charles Rosenberg and Rosemary Stevens have shown, the hospital has been a symbol of benevolence, professional medicine, and scientific and technological innovation, while at the same time perpetuating racial, ethnic, gender, and class discrimination. 3 Treatment in post-World War II hospitals in the southern United States drew on improvements in medical knowledge and technology and on a code of ethics, yet southern hospitals controlled by whites almost always either excluded African Americans or provided them separate, inferior facilities. 4 Edward H. Beardsley's work on the role of black physicians and of professional interests in hospital desegregation in the American South drove me to look more closely at why hospital desegregation progressed more smoothly than the desegregation of schools, and why it occurred as late as the early 1970s in some southern hospitals. 5 I focused on a town in [End Page 108] the Deep South--my hometown of Greenville, Mississippi--and interviewed individuals who had been physicians, nurses, administrators, and patients during the late 1960s and early 1970s when the community's two hospitals desegregated. The interviews were shaped by many factors, particularly by my relationship with the participants and the questions I asked. 6 I began each interview by explaining my interest in hospital desegregation and the questions it raised: why it occurred relatively smoothly; why it occurred so late; who opposed it and who supported it, and why. The former physicians and nurses typically would first explain what kind of medical work they had done and would then talk about their racial and interracial medical experiences. Although I would ask them to clarify or elaborate on specifics, or ask them related questions, I would not force them back onto the desegregation issue if they chose to move the conversation in another direction. In this way, I followed the suggestion of the Italian historian Alessandro Portelli that "the researcher 'accept' the informant and give priority to what she or he wishes to tell." 7 The stories people told, as they spoke from their viewpoint of the...

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