My Brother’ s Keeper, Essay By Vincent Long, MD
Pictured from Left to Right: Vince Long, MD, Andrew Staples, MD, Edem Abotsi, MD, Alexander Sida, MD.
Photo Taken By: Nancy Phu, DO
In the last few years there has been an increase in public attention highlighting the dearth of Black men in medicine. Whether due to decreased admittance into medical schools, or increased likelihood of being dismissed from residency training programs, the absence of Black men in medicine has become the norm. Historically Black Colleges and Universities produce a significant proportion of the nation’ s African American practicing physicians, although they make up only 3 % of the nation’ s degreegranting institutions.
Like the phoenix, Charles R. Drew University( CDU) was birthed out of the ashes of the 1965 Watts uprising. One of the most pressing issues that came out in the subsequent McCone Commission investigation was a cry of lamentation for the lives lost due to the lack of access to healthcare in South Los Angeles. Martin Luther King Hospital had served as the primary training site for CDU’ s graduate medical education programs, and with its closure in 2007, so went the opportunity to train the nation’ s next generation of Black and Brown physicians and surgeons. Yet, Still We Rise.
In 2017, graduate medical education returned to CDU with the approval of the University’ s Psychiatry and Family Medicine residency programs in partnership with LA County’ s Departments of Mental Health and Health Services, respectively. In 2021 the inaugural class of the Internal Medicine Residency Program became CDU’ s third rebirthed graduate medical education training program, now in partnership with the Long Beach VA Healthcare System.
This unique partnership between the federal government and this historically Black institution did not come without its fair share of challenges. The inaugural class boasted four Black men out of a class of eight, giving hope that this program would help to put an end to the pattern of paucity of Black men in medicine.
As our clinical duties commenced, we found ourselves integrated into a well-established academic machine, largely comprised of residents and fellows from the University of California Irvine School of Medicine. Some of us, native to South LA, had already experienced our fair share of difficulties while pursuing our training in SoCal. Other classmates had our own stories to tell while training on the east coast.
Despite the nuanced differences of our respective stories, there was still a central theme: the struggle is real. One of my co-residents and I had spent the last several years training at the Howard University College of Medicine, a utopia of Black excellence in the District of Columbia, an area once known affectionately as“ Chocolate City.”
Being raised in South Florida, I was one of few Black men who had made it out. I knew that I wanted to go to D. C., the
CDU College of Medicine | PG. 37