A Ghetto Destroyer

To Washington last week came 1,435 delegates for the annual convention of the National Medical Association, professional organization of U.S. Negro physicians. The encouraging news on every medical front: the bars of discrimination are falling. The delegates, who found themselves accepted in the city's best hotels and restaurants (in sharp contrast with their last Washington meeting 22 years ago), cheered a report by the District of Columbia's Dr. William Montague Cobb, chairman of N.M.A.'s Council on Medical Education and Hospitals.

Since the University of Arkansas admitted its first Negro medical student in 1948, eleven of 26 Southern medical schools have admitted Negro students.* Said Dr. Cobb: "The doors of constituent medical societies of the American Medical Association are now open [to] Negro physicians in ten of 17 Southern states and the District of Columbia . . . Steps toward the removal of racial membership restrictions have been taken in Tennessee and North Carolina."

In 1947, Negro medical graduates could hope for internships in only about 15 hospitals, most of them segregated. Last year, reported Dr. Cobb, practically every graduate of Howard and Meharry, two outstanding Negro medical schools, was accepted for internship "by the hospital of his choice." There are now Negro interns in 56 first-rate hospitals. The number of Negro specialists has increased from 87 in 1947 to 221.

Dr. Cobb's conclusion: "The present numbers are far below a desirable level . . . [But] the ghetto plan for provision of medical care for the Negro has been destroyed forever."

* Besides Arkansas, they are: St. Louis University, Medical College of Virginia, Washington University (St. Louis), and the Universities of Maryland, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Virginia, Texas, Missouri and Louisville.

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