Join UCSF Archives & Special Collections as we explore the little-known history of African American women physicians’ careers in medicine from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Through an extensive survey of the careers of all known African American women who practiced medicine in this period, a complicated portrait of both accomplishment and constraint emerges. This talk demonstrates that black women physicians succeeded in carrying out their demanding “missions” of attempting to address what we currently term “health disparities” in African American communities. Simultaneously, however, professionalized, scientific medicine in the twentieth century increasingly limited career opportunities available to black women physicians.

Speakers

Meg Vigil-Fowler, PhD is a historian of medicine who studies the intersecting histories of race, gender, and professionalization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She received her PhD from UCSF's Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine earlier this year and is currently writing a book on the earliest African American women physicians.

Renee Navarro, MD, PharmD is the Vice Chancellor of Diversity and Outreach, charged with creating and maintaining a diverse university environment where everyone has an opportunity to excel. In her new role, Navarro will collaborate with faculty, staff and students to develop and carry out a strategic plan for diversity and inclusion at the campus – and in recruitment and retention of faculty, students, trainees and staff. 

Aimee Medeiros, PhD is an Assistant Professor, History of Health Sciences at UCSF. Medeiros's work focuses on the reciprocity between diagnoses, preventive care measures, and societal expectations of the body in medicine. Medeiros's current projects include, Too Young to Die: The History of the Children’s Hospital in the U.S. and Health Sciences Data Laboratory (HSDL), which will complement Big Data efforts by generating historical medical data preserved from non-digital formats. 

This Archives Talk is brought to you by UCSF Archives & Special Collections. Free and open to the public. Refreshments provided while supply lasts.

Archives Month (October 2018)
Join UCSF Archives & Special Collections in celebrating the value of historical records and the preservation of the past in the advancement of health worldwide. Keep tweeting us throughout the month @ucsf_archives with your comments and questions!

Archives Month events:

• Oct 3: #AskAnArchivist
• Oct 10: Archives Talk (this event)
• Oct 13: San Francisco Archives Crawl
• Oct 31: Halloween Open House: Oddities of the Past in the UCSF Archives
• Ongoing exhibit: Open Wide: 500 Years of Dentistry