Search - Theses Canada

OCLC number
841710040
Author
Aloisio, Michael,1978-
Title
Dunbar Memorial Hospital, Detroit, and the Black Hospital Movement, 1915-1930.
Degree
M.A. -- University of New Brunswick, 2009
Publisher
Ottawa :Library and Archives Canada = Bibliothè€que et Archives Canada,[2012]
Description
2 microfiches
Notes
Includes bibliographical references.
Abstract
<?Pub Inc> African Americans have long been victims of a healthcare crisis: the dilemma of disproportionately high rates of disease and death on the one hand, and disproportionately low representation in the healthcare professions on the other. Nowhere was access more important, or exclusion more lethal, than in the hospital. Between 1870 and 1920 American medicine evolved, becoming more scientific and more reliant on elaborate technologies; the hospital became the essential institutional centerpiece of the new modern healthcare system. In response to this crisis, African Americans fought for integration into the white-only healthcare system while simultaneously working to support, supplement, and modernize an alternative black system Detroit's Dunbar Memorial, a small hospital built by thirty of the city's black physicians to serve an underserved community, was part of this system. The history of black healthcare has long been under-represented and this thesis begins to undo that neglect by uncovering the lost history of one of Detroit's black hospitals. To do this requires, first, a chronicle of the development of Detroit's black community, from the city's early days through to the 1920s and the Great Migration, to the emergence of a middle-class leadership steeped in an ethos of pragmatism, black self-help, self-sufficiency, and race pride; next, an examination of the depths of the black healthcare crisis in the city and Dunbar Hospital as a response to it; and, finally, an exploration of the connections of the hospital to the middle class ideology and the larger national black healthcare reform movement that demonstrates that Dunbar Memorial was in many ways representative of both.
ISBN
9780494742907
0494742909
Date modified: