The Good Doctors: The Medical Committee for Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice in Health Care

The Medical Committee for Human Rights was organized in 1964 to support civil rights activists during Mississippi's Freedom Summer. MCHR volunteers exposed racism within the American Medical Association, desegregated southern hospitals, set up free clinics in inner cities, and created the model for the community health center. They were early advocates of single-payer universal health insurance. In The Good Doctors, celebrated historian John Dittmer gives an insightful account of a group of idealists whose message and example are an inspiration to all who believe that "Health Care is a Human Right."

About the Author :
John Dittmer received the Bancroft Prize, and several other awards, for Local People The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. He is a professor of history at DePauw University

Review :
"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""" "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--they're all here, in this tour of a turbulent and inspiring time that speaks forcefully to our own."--Tony Horwitz, author of "A Voyage Long andStrange: Rediscovering the New World" and "Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War""This book is an historical landmark. Dittmer's 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