Medicine: Harlem Shuffle

The first U.S. voluntary hospital† to take both white and Negro physicians has succeeded “beyond expectation.” This announcement about Harlem’s Sydenham Hospital was made last week by Trustee Harry C. Oppenheimer.

When Sydenham began in a Harlem brownstone house in 1892, most of its ward patients were (as they still are) Negroes. But, like the rest of New York City’s voluntary hospitals, Sydenham took no Negro doctors. Twenty years ago, the hospital moved to a fine new 200-bed building. White patients filled the private and semiprivate rooms. The utility staff was mixed, and there were a few Negro nurses. The staff doctors were all white.

The only hospitals in New York City where Negro doctors could practice were the free public hospitals, where all patients were ward patients. There was, in short, no hospital where a Negro doctor could send a private patient and continue to treat him. For sick Negroes, going to the hospital meant going to a ward, accepting any doctor the hospital provided. Moreover, the banning of Negro doctors from the great voluntary teaching hospitals seriously cut a Negro’s chances of getting good training. At least part of Harlem’s high mortality rate (36% above the rest of the city in 1943) could be blamed on the shortage of good Negro doctors.

To Do What They Could. Last December, Sydenham’s trustees finally decided to do what they could, voted to accept Negroes on the medical staff, added several Negro trustees. When the staff was told of the move, two nurses and three other workers quit. But the white doctors held fast. Last February, Negro doctors began work, Negro patients began to filter into private rooms (10-20%) and semiprivate (25%). The hospital’s management, worried about mixing races in semiprivate rooms, still asks each patient whether he objects; so far none has balked.

At present, 23 of Sydenham’s staff of some 300 doctors are Negroes. Famed Negro Surgeon Peter Marshall Murray, an attending physician on the Obstetrical and Gynecological Service, has numerous white patients. Of the twelve interns, two are Negroes. About 60% of the nurses are Negroes, and there are a few Negro nurse’s aides. The hospital’s Negro backers hope the proportion of Negroes does not get too high—Sydenham might become known as a Negro hospital, and the whole experiment of interracial hospitalization would be defeated.