“So the increase in the percent of physicians who were Black over the past 80 years has been the entrance of Black women in the physician workforce.”Īndrew Brennen, Cecilia Polanco and Thang Diep Courtesy Andrew Brennen/Cecilia Polanco/Thang Diep “That’s 80 years of no improvement,” Ly said. Black men represented 2.7% of the physician workforce in 1940 and 2.6% in 2018. Dan Ly, an author of the study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine and assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.ĭata on only Black men who were physicians over the years showed that they represented 1.3% of the physician workforce in 1900, “because all physicians were pretty much men in the past,” Ly said. “The more surprising thing to me was for Black men,” said Dr. In 1940, only 2.8% of physicians were Black, but 9.7% of the US population was Black by 2018, 5.4% of physicians were Black, but 12.8% of the population was Black.

But by 1923, only two of those schools remained: Howard University Medical School in Washington and Meharry Medical School in Nashville. Smith received his MD in 1837, returned to New York City and went on to become the first Black person to own and operate a pharmacy in the United States, and to be published in US medical journals.īlack med students pose at a plantation to show how the past inspired their futureĪ few decades later, in 1900, 1.3% of physicians were Black, compared with 11.6% of the US population, according to a study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in 2021.Īround that time, seven medical schools were established specifically for Black students between 18, according to Duke University’s Medical Center Library & Archives. James McCune Smith, had to enroll at the University of Glasgow Medical School in Scotland. The first Black American to hold a medical degree, Dr. Many US medical schools have a history of not admitting non-Whites. “That requires going back to pre-college – high school, middle school, elementary school, kindergarten, pre-K – we need to do better in all of those places in order to elevate the overall trajectory to becoming a physician and make it more likely that we will get more Black doctors in the long run.”Ī deep-rooted history of racism in medicine “We need to look at which schools produce the most medical students and figure out how we improve the representation of Black students in those schools,” he said.

“We can improve our admissions to medical school, make them more holistic, try to remove bias from that, but that’s still not going to solve the problem,” Dill said. At young ages, exposure to the sciences, science education resources, mentors and role models all make it more likely that a child could become a doctor – but such exposures and resources sometimes are disproportionately not as accessible in the Black community. “And it occurs over the course of what I think of as the trajectory to becoming a physician,” Dill said. One reason why the percentage of US doctors who are Black remains far below that of the US population that is Black can be traced to how Black people have been “historically excluded from medicine” and the “institutional and systemic racism in our society,” said Michael Dill, the Association of American Medical Colleges’ director of workforce studies. “Because the way you have to move in the system as a Black person is very different, especially if you’re coming from a background where you don’t have family members that are doctors, you don’t know anyone in your periphery that went into medicine.” But then also, for my parents and my family,” Adebagbo said. “I know what to ask for on the patient side if I’m worried about something for myself. She recognizes that their encounters with her are brief, she said, and so she tries to empower them to advocate for themselves in the health system. This has enabled Adebagbo to connect with patients of color in her rotations. I not only know the science, but I also know how the system works,” she said of how in many Black and brown communities, there can be limited access to care and resources within the medical system. “The deeper I got into my medical education, the more I realized, if I’m in the system, I know how it works.

“I wanted to go into medicine because I felt like, ‘Who better to mediate that tension than someone like me, who knows what it’s like to exist in both?’ ” said Adebagbo, 26, who graduated from Stanford University and is now a third-year medical school student in Massachusetts. Seun Adebagbo, a third-year medical student in Massachusetts, hopes to contribute to the physician work force in the United States, where only 5.7% of doctors identify as Black.

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