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An examination of the lives and careers of physician-activists Dorothy Boulding Ferebee (1898-1972) and Virginia M. Alexander (1899-1949) demonstrates how Black physicians in the first half of the 20th century used public health to improve the health of Black Americans and provides insights into the experiences of Black women physicians. I discuss their professional and personal backgrounds and analyze their divergent strategies to address health inequities. Ferebee used her leadership in Black women's organizations to develop public health programs and become a national advocate for Black health. Alexander, a Quaker, used her religious connections to urge Whites to combat racism in medicine. She also conducted public health research and connected it to health activism. Both were passionate advocates of health equity long before it gained prominence as a major public health issue. An analysis of their work illuminates past efforts to improve the health of Black Americans. (Am J Public Health. 2016; 106:1397-1404. doi:10.2105/ AJPH.2016.303252)
On October 27, 1940, the Pennsylvania Institute of Negro Health, a Black medical organization, honored Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee (1898-1980) and Dr. Virginia Margaret Alexander (1899- 1949) for their "outstanding services to Negro health."1 Ferebee founded a settlement house in Washington, DC, and spearheaded the efforts of the Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) sorority to bring health care to poor Black Americans in rural Mississippi. Alexander opened a private hospital in North Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and led an investigation of the neighborhood's social, economic, and health problems. Ferebee and Alexander were colleagues at Howard University and were two of the most distinguished of the 127 Black women physicians then in the United States.2
Ferebee and Alexander both crafted careers that combined medicine, public health, and social activism and were passionate advocates for health equity. Historian Samuel Kelton Roberts has argued that in the mid-20th century Black public health practitioners, influenced by their exclusion from the mainstream field and by their connections with other Black professionals, held an "expansive" view of public health that "allowed them to link a variety of social and political problems to health in ways not normally contemplated by White professionals."3 Indeed, for Ferebee and Alexander public health sat at the intersection of their medical, social, and political concerns. Their biographies provide a lens that illuminates how Black...