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This is the untold story of Dr. J. D. Harris (1833-1884), an African American physician whose life and career straddled enormous changes for Black professionals and the practice of medicine. Born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Harris served as a contract surgeon to the Union army and transitioned to a similar post under the Freedmen's Bureau, treating Black troops and freedpeople in Virginia. Margaret Humphreys not only narrates what we know about Harris but offers context to his remarkable journey, including how incredible it was that a young man born into freedom in a slave state learned to read when literacy for Black people was illegal. He was one of very few African Americans to become a doctor before Howard Medical School opened in the 1870s, a fact that both reveals the structural barriers to medical education for Black Americans and highlights how those structures weakened in the 1860s. Drawing on census records, court records, Civil War and Reconstruction documents from the National Archives, African American newspapers, and more, this book is a revealing look at the history not only of medicine in the southern United States but also of race and citizenship during one of the nation's most tumultuous eras.
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Keywords
- African American colonization in Haiti
- African American physicians in Reconstruction
- African American physicians in the Civil War
- American Missionary Association
- Black medical students in Civil War America
- Black settlement in antebellum Iowa
- Charles Chestnutt
- Cicero Harris
- Colored Conventions
- Elizabeth W. Harris
- Fayetteville, N.C
- Fredericksburg Freedmen’s Bureau Hospital
- Free Blacks in antebellum North Carolina
- Freedmen’s Bureau
- Howard Hospital
- Howard Medical School
- Howard’s Grove Hospital
- Ira Russell
- J.D. Harris, MD
- John Brown’s Raid
- John Mercer Langston
- Oberlin-Wellington Rescue
- Robert Harris
- St. Elizabeth’s Hospital
- thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DN Biography and non-fiction prose::DNB Biography: general::DNBT Biography: science, technology and medicine
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBS Social groups, communities and identities::JBSL Ethnic studies::JBSL1 Ethnic groups and multicultural studies
- thema EDItEUR::M Medicine and Nursing::MB Medicine: general issues::MBX History of medicine
- Virginia Governor’s election 1869
- William Harris
Links
DOI: 10.5149/9781469680088_HumphreysEditions