Lincoln Hospital opened in Durham in 1901 to serve the community's African Americans as a center for patient care and medical education. With the onset of the Civil Rights Movement, however, Lincoln's competition increased, and it closed in 1976. Still, the hospital is remembered today through the Lincoln Community Health Center and in the hearts and minds of those who contributed to its history.
In the 1910s, both W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington praised the black community in Durham, North Carolina, for its exceptional race progress. Migration, urbanization, and industrialization had turned black Durham from a post-Civil War liberation community into the "capital of the black middle class." African Americans owned and operated mills, factories, churches, schools, and an array of retail services, shops, community organizations, and race institutions. Using interviews, narratives, and family stories, Leslie Brown animates the history of this remarkable city from emancipation to the civil rights era, as freedpeople and their descendants struggled among themselves and with whites to give meaning to black freedom. Brown paints Durham in the Jim Crow era as a place of dynamic change where despite common aspirations, gender and class conflicts emerged. Placing African American women at the center of the story, Brown describes how black Durham's multiple constituencies experienced a range of social conditions. Shifting the historical perspective away from seeing solidarity as essential to effective struggle or viewing dissent as a measure of weakness, Brown demonstrates that friction among African Americans generated rather than depleted energy, sparking many activist initiatives on behalf of the black community.
Untold thousands of black North Carolinians suffered or died during the Jim Crow era because they were denied admittance to white-only hospitals. With little money, scant opportunities for professional education and few white allies, African American physicians, nurses and other community leaders created their own hospitals, schools of nursing and public health outreach efforts. The author chronicles the important but largely unknown histories of more than 35 hospitals, the Leonard Medical School and 11 hospital-based schools of nursing established in North Carolina, and recounts the decades-long struggle for equal access to care and equal opportunities for African American health care professionals.
Durham is a progressive New South city, one in which both the white and black populations have economically and culturally prospered over the past century. Durham's Hayti opens a door into the community's past that will allow you to walk down familiar streets into a time that may seem distant, but is not that far removed, and to experience the full life of Hayti, from its churches and schools to its businesses and recreational pursuits.
This collection of ten essays by leading scholars in the social history of medicine provides a window into the world of the hospital, exploring the increasing complexity of both its internal and external dynamics as well as the relationship between the two. An introductory essay describes and evaluates the shifting balance between the hospital's moral and medical purposes, tracing the social, technical, physical, and medical developments that have continually shaped the image and activities of the general hospital from 1800 to the 1980s. Part One of the book places American general hospitals in the larger context of their regional, ethnic, religious, and racial communities. It contains four essays, including two case studies of local hospitals-one urban, the other rural-in transition, a photographic essay of life in community hospitals, and an account of the attempt to move black hospitals into the mainstream during the years 1920 to 1945. Part Two focuses on the professional communities within the hospital, Four essays explore the impact of technology on the modern hospital, science and the nursing profession, the changing education of hospital administrators, and the coming of age, in the 1960s, of the first hospital workers' union. A concluding article addresses crucial public policy issues and consider s prospects for the future of the American general hospital.
During his fifteen years as chancellor, Dr. Ralph Snyderman helped create new paradigms for academic medicine while guiding the Duke University Medical Center through periods of great challenge and transformation. Under his leadership, the medical center became internationally known for its innovations in medicine, including the creation of the Duke University Health System—which became a model for integrated health care delivery—and the development of personalized health care based on a rational and compassionate model of care. In A Chancellor's Tale Snyderman reflects on his role in developing and instituting these changes. Beginning his faculty career at Duke in 1972, Snyderman made major contributions to inflammation research while leading the Division of Rheumatology and Immunology. When he became chancellor in 1989, he learned that Duke’s medical center required bold new capabilities to survive the advent of managed care and HMOs. The need to change spurred creativity, but it also generated strong resistance. Among his many achievements, Snyderman led ambitious institutional growth in research and clinical care, broadened clinical research and collaborations between academics and industry, and spurred the fields of integrative and personalized medicine. Snyderman describes how he immersed himself in all aspects of Duke’s medical enterprise as evidenced by his exercise in "following the sheet" from the patient's room to the laundry facilities and back, which allowed him to meet staff throughout the hospital. Upon discovering that temperatures in the laundry facilities were over 110 degrees he had air conditioning installed. He also implemented programs to help employees gain needed skills to advance. Snyderman discusses the necessity for strategic planning, fund-raising, and media relations and the relationship between the medical center and Duke University. He concludes with advice for current and future academic medical center administrators. The fascinating story of Snyderman's career shines a bright light on the importance of leadership, organization, planning, and innovation in a medical and academic environment while highlighting the systemic changes in academic medicine and American health care over the last half century. A Chancellor's Tale will be required reading for those interested in academic medicine, health care, administrative and leadership positions, and the history of Duke University.
African Americans are greatly responsible for the impressive growth of Durham County in North Carolina, once known as the "Capital of the Black Bourgeoisie". Durham County, North Carolina, once called the "Chicago of the South" and the "Capital of the Black Bourgeoisie," has long occupied an important place in the hearts and minds of those who called Durham County home. African Americans have played a vital role in the growth and development of the region over the years, from antebellum times to Reconstruction to the Civil Rights era and in the present. The African American citizens of this historic Tar Heel county share an impressive story marked by determination, economic achievement, and resilience, and they have made a difference in all walks of life--educational, religious, civic, and commercial. This pictorial history reflects upon the rich and vibrant role that African Americans played in the area following emancipation. In its earliest stages, residents in such neighborhoods as Hayti, Hickstown, Crest Street, Pearsontown, the West End, the East End, and Walltown each created sturdy surviving communities that have shaped Durham.
