The Good Doctors

“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

“The Good Doctors provides an engaging and well-written account of how the medical community became involved in the civil rights movement, not as spectators but on the front lines—in some cases risking their lives to fight against social and political injustice.”—Journal of the American Medical Association

“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

“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

“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

“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 and Strange: Rediscovering the New World and Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“Civil-rights historian Dittmer focuses on one of the lesser-known groups involved in the struggle . . . Dittmer reveals the motivations of many of the organization’s leaders, and he paints a disturbing picture of the shameful treatment of both black doctors and patients in the South. In the early chapters he writes vividly of the challenges facing civil-rights workers and of the brutality—beatings, jailings, killings—inflicted on them . . . A stark reminder not just of the actions of a group of idealistic activists but of the violence and turmoil of the nation’s not-so-distant past.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Dittmer uses interviews plus other primary and secondary sources to shed light on an organization that has remained largely unchronicled. Clearly presented and absorbing, this is recommended for public libraries as well as academic and medical libraries with medical history collections.”—Dick Maxwell, Library Journal