doctor

Yesterday I spoke for the first time to an audience of medical practitioners at Weill Cornell Medical College/NY-Presbyterian Hospital Dept. of Geriatrics. It was in a beautiful conference room in the Gothic hulk of a building next to the East River where my daughter was born 28 years ago next week. I opened with an anecdote from a friend who brought his 83-year-old mother in to the family doctor for a check-up—she was in a wheelchair after a stroke—and when they came into his office the doctor said, “Are you still around?”

Six doctors at Johns Hopkins went around downtown Baltimore videotaping people's answers. (One of them, Thomas Finucane, significantly influenced my thinking.) Hint: nothing to do with juries.

Did you know that Jim Crow laws remained in effect for the better part of a century? Enacted in the wake of the Civil War to establish “separate but equal” status for black Americans, they were enforced in southern states between 1876 and 1965. Jim Crow laws were a major catalyst for the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities to escape segregation, among them Billy Kyle’s parents, who moved to Detroit from Missouri and Arkansas, respectively.

The search function came in handy when reviewing the transcript of my interview with Dr. Natalia Tanner, whom I met in her sunny Detroit office on November 11th. Since it feels as though everything Tanner wasn’t the first black woman pull off, she was either the first woman or the first African-American to accomplish, I’d searched for “first.” The last find was the one that stuck in my head.