When the American Medical Association recently apologized for its long practice of discrimination against black physicians, Professor Robert B. Baker found himself in the thick of a controversy involving the country’s oldest and largest physicians’ group.
Baker, chair of the Rapaport Ethics Across the Curriculum Initiative and the William D. Williams Professor of Philosophy, is the lead author of a study of the AMA’s racial policies, which prompted the historic apology.
Baker and a team of independent experts convened by the AMA in 2005 dug deep into past practices of the medical association, specifically examining the period between 1846 and 1968. The research uncovered by the panel painted an ugly picture of racial bias and discrimination that is “linked to the current paucity of African-American physicians, distrust of professional associations by some physicians, and contemporary racial health disparities,” according to the group’s report in the July 16 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. To read the complete report, click here.
In commentary in the same issue of JAMA, Ronald M. Davis, immediate past president of the AMA, cited the panel’s work and said: “The medical profession, which is based on a boundless respect for human life, had an obligation to lead society away from disrespect of so many lives. The AMA failed to do so and has apologized for that failure.”
The AMA hopes its apology and other initiatives will help close the racial divide in medicine. According to the AMA’s Web site, as of 2006, less than 2 percent of its members were black and fewer than 3 percent of the country’s 1 million medical students and physicians were black, despite blacks representing roughly 13 percent of the U.S. population.
As Baker, who also directs the Union Graduate College-Mount Sinai School of Medicine Bioethics Program, told the Washington Post: “The apology is important because a heritage of discrimination is evident in the under-representation of African-Americans in medicine generally and in the AMA in particular. Patterns of segregated medicine still haunt American health care. The legacy of these decisions affects minority patients on a daily basis.”