Jack D. Ellis – författare

Between the birth of the Third Republic and the outbreak of World War I, French medical doctors gained a far-reaching influence over the political life of their country, serving as mayors on the local level and ranking second only to lawyers in parliament. Their frequent medical contact with the people served as the foundation for their political success. In this volume, first published in 1990, Ellis explores the causes and significance of this phenomenon by examining the careers of the members of parliament who held degrees in medicine. It is the first book to deal explicitly with the backgrounds and careers of the physician-legislators, and uses a wealth of previously untapped sources. This study places medical history within a larger political framework and will be of interest to all concerned with modern French and European history, the social history of medicine, and the evolution of the professions.

Beside the Troubled Waters is a memoir by an African American physician in Alabama whose story in many ways typifies the lives and careers of black doctors in the south during the segregationist era while also illustrating the diversity of the black experience in the medical profession. Based on interviews conducted with Hereford over ten years, the account includes his childhood and youth as the son of a black sharecropper and Primitive Baptist minister in Madison County, Alabama, during the Depression; his education at Huntsville’s allblack Councill School and medical training at Meharry Medical College in Nashville; his medical practice in Huntsville’s black community beginning in 1956; his efforts to overcome the racism he met in the white medical community; his participation in the civil rights movement in Huntsville; and his later problems with the Medicaid programme and state medical authorities, which eventually led to the loss of his license.Hereford’s memoir stands out because of its medical and civil rights themes, and also because of its compelling account of the professional ruin Hereford encountered after 37 years of practice, as the end of segregation and the federal role in medical care placed black doctors in competition with white ones for the first time.