This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Dec. 2, 2009 - Even now, 81 years later, Dr. John Gladney cannot forget the smell. It had filled his nostrils when he entered the basement ward of Arkansas Baptist, a segregated hospital in Little Rock, where his mother lay terminally ill.
"I was 6 years old, taken there by my grandmother, and I remember the place being dirty and crowded with sick people. And smelly, too," he says, adding that he began to associate this "strange odor" with older people dying. "It was just revolting to me."
The incident turned out to be a defining moment for Gladney, inspiring him to pursue a career in medicine and ensure patient care far superior to what his mother had received in that dingy ward. He would become part of an early wave of African-American physicians who interned at Homer G. Phillips Hospital and eventually worked their way up to positions of authority in white hospitals. Gladney would become chair of the Department of Otolaryngology at St. Louis University Medical School, making him the first African-American to head a basic science clinical department at the school.
Like other blacks in medicine at the time, Gladney was familiar with the term "colored doctor," which insinuates a second-class status. It came from the lips of plenty of insensitive people, including some leaders of the American Medical Association. The term and the attitude associated with it, he says, were offset partly by moral and professional support from some white doctors but even more by the training and mentoring from medical leaders during his studies at Meharry Medical College in Nashville and later his internship at Phillips.
The caring atmosphere inside these two institutions, he says, gave him an enlightened view of medicine. During the late 1940s at Phillips, for example, the medical chief instilled in him and other young doctors a sense of duty, a belief that they should feel gratitude for the opportunity to learn and grow by respecting and serving patients with no other options for medical treatment. Gladney says he found the advice uplifting, an antidote to the bad memory -- the sights and the smell -- of the basement ward at Arkansas Baptist.
Now retired, he likes to say, "not many guys, black or white," have practiced medicine as long as he. However, quite a few African-American physicians here can make similar boasts. They include retired Drs. Les Bond, Helen Nash, Homer Nash, Jerome Williams, and at least one who still practices -- Dr. James M. Whittico.
Dr. Jerome Williams Sr.
Unlike Gladney, Williams was born in St. Louis and is one of three generations of doctors. He followed his father into medicine, and two of his sons also became doctors. One practices here and the other in Columbia.
"When I was growing up, I wanted to be a preacher or a lawyer," Williams says, "but I became a doctor. It was sort of a misdirection that I have enjoyed tremendously."
At the start of his medical training, Williams was sickened with tuberculosis in 1948 and was sidetracked for two years. At the time, the disease was considered incurable, but Williams pulled through. He likes to joke that it made him a "TB specialist," and the most logical person to be appointed head of TB services at Phillips at the time. He held that position for two years and later headed the hospital's outpatient department for 15 years.
At 84, he remains active after having served as the first black president of the St. Louis Community College Board as well as a member of the Community College Foundation, the state Board of the Healing Arts, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and the Missouri Botanical Garden Commission. He also has an activist streak that prompted him to organize doctors and other professionals to participate in the Jefferson Bank protests in 1963 to create more jobs in the black community.
Dr. Frank O. Richards
Like Williams, Richards grew up in the company of doctors. A brother, a sister-in-law and a brother-in-law were all physicians.
"I can't say I was a child out of the ghetto who did this," he says. "I had support all the way."
Richards' son is also a physician, working on river blindness and malaria as part of the Atlanta-based Carter Center. Born in Asheville, N.C., Richards became a highly regarded surgeon here. Like others of his generation, he helped to break down barriers in medicine and witnessed the period when Washington University and St. Louis University medical schools opened jobs and staff privileges to black physicians like himself. He gives part of the credit for this change to forward-looking white doctors, such as the late Dr. Evarts A. Graham, former chief of surgery at Washington University.
Richards adds that the increase in black doctors on the staffs of the two medical schools is also due to the determination among pioneering black doctors, now in their 80s, who had been pushing for change as far back as the days when medicine was segregated.
"Only about 13 or us are left now," he says of these elders. "We're like family to each other; we're always very close. When I look back at all the battles we fought to get those doors open, I don't think our youngsters appreciate that, don't understand how hard it was for us to get into Barnes."
Even more bothersome to him, however, is that demographic changes have deprived many urban black youngsters of a positive image that might encourage them to consider medicine.
"They don't have the examples we used to have. They don't see doctors in their neighborhoods in white coats. They don't see nurses going into the hospital. I think of the role models they don't see anymore because we've moved away from the center."
Richards also allows himself a few bittersweet thoughts about the days when St. Louis was segregated -- not that he wants to turn back the clock. Richards says academic preparation remains crucial for blacks to compete successfully and persevere.
Even in retirement, he makes it a point to drop by Washington University Medical School where he mentors students "so they can see someone who's black and who has made it through tough times. I tell them they can do it, too."
It's the kind of advice that inspired men and women from his own generation to make breakthroughs in the medical profession.
