Good Doctors

The Medical Committee for Human Rights was organized in the summer of 1964 by medical professionals, mostly white and Northern, to provide care and support for Civil Rights activists who were organizing black voters in Mississippi. They left their lives and lucrative private practices to march beside and tend the wounds of demonstrators from Freedom Summer, to the March on Selma, to the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. Galvanized, and sometimes radicalized, by their firsthand view of disenfranchised communities, the MCHR soon expanded its mission to encompass a range of causes from poverty to the war in Vietnam, and later took on the whole of the United States healthcare system. The MCHR doctors soon realized that fighting segregation would mean not just caring for white volunteers, but exposing and correcting the shocking inequalities in segregated health care. They pioneered community health plans and brought medical care to underserved, or unserved, areas.

Though education was the most famous battleground for integration, the appaling injustice of segregated health care had equally devastating consequences. Award-winning historian John Dittmer, author of the classic Civil Rights history Local People, has written an insightful and moving account of a group of idealists who put their careers in the service of the belief, stated in their motto, that "Health Care Is a Human Right."

“Those who think themselves familiar with the civil rights movement in the United States are in for a welcome surprise.  The Good Doctors by prize-winning historian John Dittmer tells the heroic, and previously overlooked, story of an organization that stood at the barricades in every civil rights struggle from Selma to Chicago to Wounded Knee, battling inequality and racism in the medical profession while setting up clinics that today reach hundreds of thousands of underserved patients.  The Good Doctors should be required reading for every American who views quality health care as a basic human right.”—David Oshinsky, author of Polio: An American Story, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in History “Deeply researched, brilliantly conceived, beautifully written and unsparing in its analysis of every character who walks across its pages, The Good Doctors is a triumph of passionate scholarship and balanced judgment.”—James H. Jones, author of Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment "A significant contribution to historical analysis of the 1960s … particularly timely today. Dittmers satisfying work delivers both historical detail and contextual nuance in an illuminating discussion that fills in a previous gap in the scholarly literature."—American Historical Review  "In this era of racial healing, The Good Doctors is a shocking reminder of how recently Jim Crow reigned over medical care in America. Well into the 1960s, many hospitals and doctors offices remained segregated, with blacks given separate and grossly unequal access to beds, waiting rooms, and other basic services. Dittmer tells the tale of the courageous few in the medical profession who fought racial injustice and went on to many other battles in the 1960s and early 1970s. Freedom Summer, Selma, the anti-war movement, Alcatraz, Wounded Knee—theyre all here, in this tour of a turbulent and inspiring time that speaks forcefully to our own."—Tony Horwitz, author of A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World and Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“This book is an historical landmark. Dittmers chronicle of civil rights health care workers is captivating. All of us need to appreciate these brave pioneers.”—Alvin F. Poussaint, M.D., Harvard Medical School

“The good doctors of John Dittmer's history of the Medical Committee for Human Rights labored at the crossroads of American medicine and American racism. Forty years later the nation chose for its President a Black man committed to universal health care, an incredible valedictory to the risky and humanistic work of the MCHR.  The Good Doctors relates the beginning of that American journey, the story of health workers confronting a system hardwired to deliver second-class medicine to people of color. The Good Doctors is an important, dramatic and timely contribution to our understanding of racism in medicine and health equity in America.”—Fitzhugh Mullan, M.D., George Washington University  

The Medical Committee for Human Rights was organized in the summer of 1964 by medical professionals, mostly white and Northern, to provide care and support for Civil Rights activists who were organizing black voters in Mississippi. They left their lives and lucrative private practices to march beside and tend the wounds of demonstrators from Freedom Summer, to the March on Selma, to the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. Galvanized, and sometimes radicalized, by their firsthand view of disenfranchised communities, the MCHR soon expanded its mission to encompass a range of causes from poverty to the war in Vietnam, and later took on the whole of the United States healthcare system. The MCHR doctors soon realized that fighting segregation would mean not just caring for white volunteers, but exposing and correcting the shocking inequalities in segregated health care. They pioneered community health plans and brought medical care to underserved, or unserved, areas.

Though education was the most famous battleground for integration, the appaling injustice of segregated health care had equally devastating consequences. Award-winning historian John Dittmer, author of the classic Civil Rights history Local People, has written an insightful and moving account of a group of idealists who put their careers in the service of the belief, stated in their motto, that Health Care Is a Human Right.