African American Doctors

The relationship between black patients and doctors has always been strained by the injustice done by doctors in history. One such example stated in the book is the Tuskegee syphilis studies: They recruited hundreds of African-American men with syphilis, then watched them die slow, painful, preventable deaths, even after they realized penicillin could cure them. …

In Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun a number of social issues are both explicitly and subtly exemplified through out the characters experiences and relationships. Living in a cramped Chicago apartment, the Youngers’ display both influential goals and conflicting restraints. Beneatha Youngers is a controversial character; she complicates society’s typical gender roles, introduces the wrestle between assimilation and ancestry of African-Americans, but specifically serves as a paradigm for her generation in the play.

Not only is she black but she’s a woman so in the 1950s the whole world was against her. “I know―because that’s what it says in all the novels that men write. But it isn’t. Go ahead and laugh―but I’m not interested in being someone’s little episode in America[...] (page 64)” Beneatha is a feminist and a resilient character but every male figure in her life treats her dream like a joke and a phase. She is belittled by her own brother who tells her to just be a nurse. She is belittled by George Murchinson her boyfriend who tells her that she’s too pretty for thoughts and that her dream is just a girlish fantasy. Even Asagai treats her as lower to himself. But Beneatha has dreams. After seeing a child named Rufus get his face split open and thinking he’d never be put back together, she saw him later all fixed up by doctors. This was a life changing moment. From then on Beneatha wanted to be a doctor and she is working as hard as she can to get there. This money is crucial for Beneatha. In order to become a doctor she needs to go to medical school but in order to go to medical school she needs money. Half of the insurance money was supposed to go towards her college education but instead her brother lost it

The play by Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun, presents an African-American family living in poverty in the 1950’s. The family receives ten thousand dollars from deceased Mr. Younger’s insurance; the money is supposed to be distributed in buying a house, Beneatha’s education, and Walter’s liquor store investment. However, Walter invests wrongly and loses more than half of the money, forcing Beneatha to consider moving to Africa to pursue an education. Beneatha Younger’s struggle with segregation while pursuing her dream of becoming a doctor demonstrates that education can be obtained with determination and discipline.

population. They only make up 4% of physicians; of these 4% only 2% percent are female. With regards to this, diversity in the medical profession is important. As an aspiring future African-American female physician, I will have an opportunity to directly impact minority communities and empathize with my patients. I would like to become a physician to improve healthcare in my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. The poverty rate in Birmingham a predominately African-American city is 30.9%. The average household income in the city is less than $32,000, as a consequence of low income levels; the rate of health disparities is greatly

The price they paid to visit the doctor was out of reach for most black workers such as maids and farm workers. “Most southern hospitals refused to admit African American patients. They were treated in black hospitals, which had far less beds.”(33) Patients of colors had minimal access to many hospitals for education and treatment. Katznelson stated “despite a higher birth rate than whites, the size of the African American families lagged, which is the result of disproportionate infant and maternal mortality rates. Rate of death for blacks remained high across the age range.”(34) The federal government reported that at birth, life expectancy of African Americans was much less, about ten years less, than whites and predicted to increase.

It’s no surprise that medical schools tend to show bias against ethnic minorities. White students have a disproportionately higher chance of being accepted into medical school than most ethnic minorities although they have the same qualifications such as high GPA and MCAT scores. If the system was equal and unbiased then the acceptance rates of students of of color with the same qualifications should be accepted equally as white students however the numbers don’t add up. Of medical schools graduating classes in the past a mere 6.8 percent of those students were minority students, “For the 2012-13 academic year, 45,000 people applied for medical school out of which about half were accepted. Of that number, 8.7 percent were Hispanic and 6.5 percent African American” (Alexander).

Though there was a heightened sense of tension over civil rights in the late 1950s when A Raisin in the Sun was written, racial inequality is still a problem today. It affects minorities of every age and dynamic, in more ways than one. Though nowadays it may go unnoticed, race in every aspect alters the way African-Americans think, behave, and react as human beings. This is shown in many ways in the play as we watch the characters interact. We see big ideas, failures, and family values through the eyes of a disadvantaged group during an unfortunate time in history. As Martin Luther King said, Blacks are “...harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what

The evolution of women’s rights and advancements throughout history is undeniable. The prejudice against women in the workforce and more specifically in the medical workforce is a prejudice that can easily be found till this day. The idea of gender roles, and the separation of women and the “male dominated careers”, still lingers even through decades of change in a developing society. Fortunately, certain women in history have forever influenced the way medicine works as well as how women are looked upon when studying in the medical field. Although there were many male physicians far before the first woman could even be considered to attend a medical school, there were many women that wouldn’t take no for an answer. Whether it was through an

African-Americans have experienced racism since the 1600s and throughout American history. However, not many books have been able to display the ethnic ignorance that white people have towards blacks. One of the more successful stories is A Raisin in the Sun shares a compelling story about an African-American family during the 1900s and offers many themes about social class and race. In A Raisin in the Sun, a negative legacy is left on modern drama due to the many examples of poverty and the message of money in the novel; though some people may believe that the play was an accurate depiction of the African-American lifestyle and their culture, they are wrong to believe this impractical belief because it leads to many white people assuming

“A Medical History of African American and the Problems of Race begins in 1990” is the second journal that identified the medical and other problems pertaining to the African in the end of the 19th century.The book has identified the history of the African American in the United States, and the underlying

Beneatha repatly repats in the play is " I am going to be a doctor ... i am going to be a doctor everyone hear better understand that" pg 75. When lorraine wrote this my prospective was that beneatha desire is to be a docotor. She not going to let people and being woman stop her for being what she wants to be. Being a woman shouldn't decide her

Physicians in medical settings that treat mostly Black patients are less likely to be board certified and thus less competent than those in settings for Whites. The physician 's lack of certification manifests itself in lower knowledge about cancer prevention and screening, poorer management of chronic diseases, and a smaller likelihood to advise modifying one 's diet or smoking behavior. These factors of geographic proximity and health care personnel and facility all contribute to the disparity in quality of care.

Walter, being even more stressed about the money that is going to cost for Beneatha’s medical school, yells at Bennie, “Who the hell told you you had to be a doctor? If you so crazy ‘bout messing ‘round with sick people—then go be a nurse like other women—or just get married and be quiet” (Hansberry 1300). The quote shows us that Bennie’s long wanting dream of being a doctor is going to be even harder to achieve because of not only poverty, but also sexism. Even though the American Dream states that if a person works hard, his or her dream will come true no matter what, Bennie proves that it is not going to happen because sexism is restricting her.

     Beneatha is an intellectual. Twenty years old, she attends college and is better educated than the rest of the Younger family. Some of her personal beliefs and views have distanced her from conservative Mama. She dreams of being a doctor and struggles to determine her identity as a well-educated black woman. She realizes her brother, Walter, dislikes the idea of spending the insurance money on the college tuition but is determined to be successful in her life: “BENEATHA: What are you talking about Ruth? Listen, I’m going to be a doctor … first I’m going to be a doctor! (I.i pg. 50)” Beneatha builds her frustration upon the doubts of her brother. When Walter