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Saturday, September 29, 2012

"Lucy Manetta Hughes Brown"April 26 1863-June 11 1911)

Physician and educator, was born in Mebanesville North Carolina,one of eight children.Her parents names aren't known.There are no records of Lucy earlier education, but in 1881 she enrolled at Scotia Seminary in Concord, North Carolina,and graduated in 1885. Four years later she married David Brown, a minister, and the following year entered Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania,founded in 1850 and the first medical school for women in America.When Lucy matriculated at the school in 1891,it was one of the best medical colleges in the country. After graduating from Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1894 she returned to North Carolina and practiced medicine in her home state for two years before going to Charleston,South Carolina,where she became the first female African-American physician in South Carolina. A year later,a fellow alumna from Woman's  Medical College,Matilda Arabella Evans,began a practice in Columbia, South Carolina,and became the second black female physician in the state.In 1897 Lucy and Alonzo Clifton McClennan founded the Cannon Hospital and training School for Nurses in Charleston,with Alonzo as surgeon-in-charge and instruction of surgical nursing and hygiene and Lucy as instructor of obstetric and pediatric nursing and head of gynecology and the nursing staff.This partnership not only provided health care for blacks patients,but also,through the leadership of Lucy and Alonzo,provided clinical experience for aspiring black nurses.The institution was initially intended to be a training school for nurses,but there were no facilities in Charleston where black nurses could get practical training in a hospital ward,so Lucy and Alonzo added the hospital.Cannon Hospital and Training School for Nurses was one of many black hospitals that were established by blacks between 1890 and 1920.In Chicago, a city of fifteen thousands blacks in the 1890s,unless blacks were patients of white doctors,there were no hospitals that would admit them until Provident Hospital was built in 1891.Hospitals for blacks were desperately needed,not only because mortality rates were significantly higher for blacks than for whites but also because white medical professionals were using these statistics as another indication of the racial inferiority of African-Americans.Leaders in the American Public Health Association declared blacks a health threat to society and devoted an entire issue of their official publication,and the American Journal of Public Health,to the "Negro Health Problem,"featuring articles that portrayed blacks as a medical menace.Frederick Hoffman,chief statistician for Prudential Life Insurance,contributed to the discussion of health status and race by referring to black as members of a "dying race" in his book Race Traits and the Tendencies of the American Negro,published in 1896.Daniel Hale Williams head of Provident Hospital,aggressively challenged these assumptions,arguing that discrimination,which forced blacks to live in unsanitary and unsafe conditions without access to medical care,was directly responsible for the discrepancy between black and white life expectancies.At a symposium around the time,Daniel  and eleven other black physicians refuted the "dying race" concept and contended that speculation about the survival of blacks was meaningless and premature without a record of every birth and death in the black race for a period of at leat ten years.They questioned the validity of statistics based on the observations and memories of doctors in states like North Carolina, with large black populations,but no board of health in many counties.A few years after its founding,the Cannon Hospital and Training School began the Hospital Herald,which described itself as "a journal devoted to hospital work,nurse training and domestic and public hygiene,"with Alonzo as editor in chief and Lucy as one of two associates editors.The journal not only served as a source of professional and personal information for those who were associated with the school, but it was also an effective promotonal tool for procuring much-needed financial support.Within a short time,the work of the institution was known not only in South Carolina but also throughout the South.Her career had an auspicious beginning,and there were indications that she would have a long and productive professional life as physician and nursing instructor.But illness forced her into an early retirement in 1904,and she died seven years later.

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