AFRICAN AMERICAN HEALERS

Brief biographies of two dozen African-American doctors, nurses, and healers from the earliest days of this country to the present comprise this latest in the Black Star series. Biographies are divided into four chronological sections. Particularly in the early chapters, it is interesting to note how often information is simply lost: James Durham of New Orleans, first black doctor in the United States, vanishes from history after 1802, and it is not known when or where Civil War nurse Susie King Taylor, who published an autobiography in 1902, died. The struggles of black healers to secure a medical education when so many schools were closed to them and to continue their training in segregated hospitals come across clearly in story after story. Daniel Hale Williams was the first person to perform heart surgery (in 1893—the patient lived another 50 years), and Charles Richard Drew invented the blood bank in the 1930s. Minor misspellings and a wrong definition aside (obstetrics is the branch of medicine dealing directly or indirectly with birth, not a “branch . . . that deals with children”), the text is clear; it can be coy in spots, not defining, for example, what syphilis is, nor explaining why Jocelyn Elders had to resign from the office of the Surgeon General. (index, not seen, b&w photos, chronology, notes, bibliography) (Biography. 10-14)