- [Announcer 1] Major funding for this program was provided by: (bright piano music) - [Announcer 2] Frederick Douglas Hospital, Mercy Hospital, Mercy-Douglas Hospital.

(gentle music) - One of the things that was so beautiful about those three hospitals, they stood tall against a grim reality of Black life at the time.

They symbolized hope, they symbolized compassion, they could symbolize solidarity.

(gentle music) They represented Black people caring for Black people.

(gentle music) It starts in 1895 when Dr. Nathan Mossell founded Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital and Nurse Training school.

- There were no other opportunities for African American physicians to train postgraduate and also nurses had to be trained.

So he built a hospital.

- He vowed that his hospital would always represent the ideals of racial equality and justice.

So the hospital, he said was actually founded in protest of segregation.

It was open to all, regardless of race, creed and ability to pay.

Though nearly all of the staff and patients at Douglas were Black.

- Nathan graduated with honors from Lincoln University and then from Lincoln University he went to the University of Pennsylvania Medical School.

First African American to graduate from the school, and he was a real trailblazer.

- But even though he graduated from the top of his class he was denied admission into the university's hospital on the basis of race.

- Nathan's parents wanted their children educated.

So they left the United States and went to Canada and he was raised in Canada until he was about 10.

And then the family moved back to the United States and his father started a business building bricks.

So they had the money to educate their children.

His brother Aaron, followed in Nathan's footsteps.

He went to Lincoln University and he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School being first African American to graduate from the university.

If you wanna think about it they were only two generations from slavery.

And to be able to get a degree from the university and to be able to move from there to get a law degree or a medical degree to be a doctor, they were brilliant.

- And from all the accounts, he had a good performance at University of Pennsylvania, could not get postgraduate training in Philadelphia.

So Dr. Mossell, being from a pretty affluent family was able to go to London and get the training he needed.

- And worked in London at a number of different hospitals in London, Guy's, St. Thomas's.

And the color of his skin had much less impact on how people treated him and came back with a vision of how things could be.

- [Hafeeza] He met with a group of local Black doctors and some influential members of the Black community.

And together they conceived of this hospital.

- There were donors who helped us found the hospital founding donors.

And there are lists, there are all sorts of, Madam C.J.

Walker was one of them.

Many of the physicians, both Black and White in the city helped to found the hospital 'cause I think many people recognized that it was going to serve a need that was desperate.

- The first Black hospital actually was in Chicago.

That was a Providence Hospital, started by Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, who also has the fame of doing the first open heart surgery.

So Providence Hospital started in 1891 and Douglas Hospital started in 1895.

But again, the missions were very similar.

Training doctors, training nurses, and taking care of people who didn't have anywhere else to go to get care.

- [Hafeeza] So that's where the story starts.

(gentle music) - The founding mission of the College of Physicians in 1787 was to advance the science of medicine and to thereby lessen human misery.

The mission today is advancing the cause of health whilst upholding the ideals and heritage of medicine.

Medicine in Philadelphia over the years has been largely dominated by White physicians and I think many of them are unaware of the stories of these incredible early Black physicians who really pushed boundaries and really made incredible things happen.

So one of the things that we're trying to do here at the college is to make that story more widely known.

- What we're looking at is the charter and certificate of incorporations for the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital and Training School.

So this is the legal document that establishes the school as a legal entity.

So we received this item as well as I would think of as a companion item which is the charter for the Mercy Hospital and School for Nurses of Philadelphia.

And we received both documents at the same time in 1974.

- It's from 1907 and it's in poor condition because it's old and it's on fairly acidic paper.

And it wasn't really stabilized the same way that the charter from the Frederick Douglass Hospital was.

It's an important record of the history of medicine in general but also the history of medicine in Philadelphia.

And that's what we're all about here.

- We have three tremendously important portraits.

The first one is of Nathan Francis Mossell.

And the portrait was commissioned by Mossell's niece, who was Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander - Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander she was a first in many areas.

She went to the University of Pennsylvania undergrad got a BA degree in in education.

But then she went back to the University of Pennsylvania and she received a master's and a PhD in economics.

I mean, she was the first African American woman to get a PhD in economics.

She then attended University of Pennsylvania Law School and she was admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar.

She was the niece of Ossawa Tanner, who was the famous painter.

If you could go back in history and talk to anybody in my family she certainly is one of the women I would talk to.

- Henry McKee Minton was an extraordinary man.

He was a graduate of Jefferson Medical School.

He's also very well known for the fact that he was the founder with five other healthcare professionals of the Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, which is called The Boulé.

And this club has continued to this day and has had many famous members such as W.E.B Dubois and Martin Luther King Jr.

But he is known as the founder of this very incredible organization that's done an awful lot of good for the Black community around the world.

Dr. Eugene Hinson was a surgeon and gynecologist.

He was born in Philadelphia, Philadelphian.

He was actually the second Black graduate of Penn Medical School.

- Again, he couldn't find the training he wanted but there was an opportunity to get the training he wanted at Frederick Douglass Hospital.

- After Mossell and Hinson graduated from the medical school they started to take more Black medical students.

But then they asked Dr. Mossell if he would be willing to have those medical students finish their training, their in person, practical training at Frederick Douglas Memorial Hospital because they couldn't do that final part of their training at Penn.

'Cause Penn didn't accept black students in that situation.

And Mossell absolutely said no, because he felt like they should take them themselves.

Hinson went to Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital with Dr. Mossell and worked there for a while.

- And they worked pretty well together for a couple years.

And then all of a sudden the guys the young guys got a little disgruntled.

- The complaint was that Mossell ran a one man show.

The younger physicians didn't have an opportunity to get OR surgical experience.

And so a group of doctors broke off from Douglas and founded Mercy Hospital.

So Mercy Hospital and School of Nursing was founded in 1907 by Dr. Eugene Hinson.

Mercy was to be be a new progressive venture to provide professional development opportunities for young physicians that were not available to them at Douglas Hospital under Mossell's leadership.

- They borrowed $9,000 and bought another hospital at 17th and Fitzwater.

For years, the two hospitals operated with the same mission, training physicians, training nurses and taking care of poor Black people.

- It created some tension between the two hospitals and a bit of rivalry and kind of split the Black Philadelphia community in half each hospital had their loyal base of supporters.

- In fact, the doctors at Mercy Hospital didn't wanna have much to do with the doctors at Douglas Hospital.

Mercy would considered themselves the elite, the young innovative kind of physicians.

- Both hospitals were experiencing major financial problems.

But the financial issues were particularly acute at Douglas because Douglas Hospital tended to accept more non-paying patients.

The financial problems were also exacerbated after The Great Depression, the community just didn't have the money anymore to support both hospitals.

So the state donors, the Black community they all urged the hospitals to merge because they said it would be more beneficial to support one robust hospital than to try to support two struggling hospitals.

So in 1948, they merged for Mercy-Douglas Hospital and School of Nursing.

(gentle music) I received my doctoral philosophy in nursing from University of Pennsylvania.

While I was a student in the nursing school I was part of the Barbara Bates Research Center and that's how I got introduced to Mercy Douglas.

- We received the archives from the Mercy Douglas Nursing School Alumni Association very, very early in our history.

And the alumni were very generous in selecting the Barbara Bates Center as the kind of trustee of sorts of their own history.

And it has turned into one of our most heavily used and most popular collections because it also included an incredible array of alumni photographs as well.

We have whatever the alumni association thought was important to tell their story.

And that can be very different than what physicians or hospital administrators thought was important to tell their history of the hospital.

- Scholars we would call this a gem in the archive when you find something like this, because usually we have to do this work ourselves, but it's already here.

The amount of labor and effort and love that went into creating this piece, it's extraordinary.

We rarely find things like this on history of Black hospitals.

They did just an incredible job of archiving and taking control of their story.

(gentle music) When the hospital merged in 1948 the plan was to fully integrate the hospital both Mercy and Douglas.

The hospital leadership viewed themselves as an interracial hospital, but larger society both the Black and White community viewed the hospitals as segregated hospitals, as negro hospitals.

By the 1940s, most Black patients were actually receiving care in the city's hospitals, not Mercy-Douglass.

That was because of the Great migration and the Black Philadelphia population exploded.

These hospitals were basically forced to accept black patients because Mercy Douglass was too small to care for the city's entire Black population.

And so the way that it worked is that Black patients could receive care in these hospitals but usually on a segregated basis, meaning they were on segregated wards.

If it was a private room it would be always a private room with another Black person.

- My time in spending Mercy was really when I had my general practice in North Philadelphia.

Somewhere along the line, when I had my practice, I said, "Maybe I need to look into psychiatry to me it was a top flight hospital."

And the care of the patients I think was top flight.

- The level of care was good because we had excellent doctors all around.

For pediatrics if there was a significant problem we just transfer 'em down to children go down there.

- The problem here was, of course with the physicians being excluded from some of the other medical institutions.

You had some excellent doctors now fused together at Mercy-Douglas.

- Dr. Edward Cooper went on to be a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania and was elected the National President of the American Heart Association.

He was a physician at Mercy-Douglas Hospital.

People like Dr. Al Gaskins was a prominent pediatrician in Philadelphia.

Maurice Clifford went on to be the president of Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania.

There was a guy there who was sort of a legend by the name of Ed Holloway, a board certified cardiologist and a legend about him who was not only was he a great cardiologist, but he knew more about other people's specialties than they knew.

So I can't imagine what it must have been like operating or working in the hospital.

He had all of these great intelligent Black practitioners.

- When I was a teenager, I got into a summer program and I was assigned to Mercy-Douglas Hospital.

One Saturday I was working and one of the nursing supervisors was making rounds and she said, "I need you to come on the floor and help do some baths."

I said, "I don't think I know how to do that."

She said, "Do you have any children?"

I said, "Yes ma'am, I have a little boy."

She said, "Do you bathe him?"

I said, "Yes."

She said, "Then you know how to give a bath."

And you know, back then when you were asked to do something you didn't say, "Yes.

Yeah, that's not my job I'm not doing."

You did whatever it was they asked you to do and they were always willing to show you how to do it.

And then I went to Practical Nursing School and then from Practical Nursing School, I went to RN School and hear I am.

- All three hospitals had an adjoining nursing school.

Nursing schools were considered a lucrative enterprise for hospitals and physicians because hospitals could provide the students with room and board in exchange for a cheap and steady supply of labor.

The student nurses who did the bulk of the direct patient care were not paid at all.

And let me just clarify, all hospitals, Black and White exploited nurses and student nurses.

- Because if you think about medicine in the turn of the century in the '20s and '30s and '40s there weren't a whole lot of MRIs and CAT scans and robotic surgery.

What we needed to make patients better was just patient care, sanitation, turning patients those kind of things.

The thing that helped patients in that time was the nurses.

- I learned a lot about delivery of babies.

You be on service says three o'clock in the morning mother's about to deliver.

A lot of times the obstetrician didn't get there in time.

So it's me and the nurse.

And the person who taught me was a nurse.

- I interviewed about 20 nurses who graduated between 1948 and about 1957, the majority of the time they were in the classroom and on the wards.

Their typical day was a 12 hour work day.

Sometimes every day, even on Sundays.

They said, "Well, what did you do on your days off?"

And most of them say, "I slept."

They were so exhausted from the labor.

Mercy-Douglass took a keen interest in developing these women's political consciousness and sort of getting them ready to go out into the real world.

That was actually part of their training where they prepared them for the White world.

They were committed to the community and they were committed to those positions.

One nurse said when they would walk through the community someone would yell out, here comes the nurse and here comes the nurse.

Was a signal for everyone to sort of step aside and allow her to pass through.

They were very dignified and respectable women.

Black nurses were sort of the embodiment of Black lady hood but they had grit.

In the '50s, while there were still some members of the community as still supported Mercy-Douglass, many folks in the Black community did not wanna support it, number one because they viewed it as a segregated hospital as the Black hospital.

Also, there were some folk in the community who believed White doctors and nurses were intellectually superior to Black doctors and nurses.

- I remember when I was a senior student in medical school one day an African-American woman came in to be treated and she was told that I would be her physician and she said, "Oh no."

She said, "I don't want a Black doctor."

But that the only time that it ever hit me face on that one patient - Some would say that integration closed Mercy-Douglas Hospital.

Even Black physicians during the '50s typically admitted their patients tow White hospitals not Mercy-Douglas.

- The care was good, but we were progressively losing people going off to places like Jefferson, University of Pennsylvania, you name it.

- But at the same time these were opportunities that they had long been denied.

And so I think it's, it's a lot more complicated than to just sort of reduce it down to these black doctors and nurses abandoned the hospital.

They abandoned the Black men 'cause they did receive a lot of criticism from Black nationalists who accused them abandoning the community and putting their professional interests and their own interests over the collective good.

But it was a lot more complicated than them.

(gentle music) - They closed in 1973.

They didn't have enough funds to do what they needed to do.

They thought that they could have been better supported by government agencies and they weren't.

- Just like the other hospitals that I've been at are all closed down the same.

Philadelphia General closed, Misericordia has closed and St. Joseph up on Gerard Avenue closed for exactly the same reason, money.

(gentle music) - Founded in 1895 by a couple physicians.

The National Medical Association is the oldest black organization that is geared to advancing the interest of Black physicians.

Now, the Medical Society of Eastern Pennsylvania started in 1961 in Philadelphia.

And our mission is similar to the mission of the National Medical Association.

Again, we want to advance the professional interest of African-American physicians, and we also wanna make sure that disparities particularly as they apply to African-Americans, are dealt with.

- What's very interesting to me is the number of African-American males who are no longer going into medicine, even being outnumbered now by the African-American females.

- And also we have very few African-Americans who are born in the United States.

So many of the black physicians that we see are born abroad.

Nothing wrong with that, but I'm saying what's happening here in the United States?

Why is it that young Black boys, young Black girls are not aspiring to be physicians?

I mean, it's a great living and it's a great job.

So I really would like to see more young boys and young girls go into medicine.

I don't really think that the racism is the primary issue here any longer.

There are other issues involved.

- We've had a number of programs to try to identify and encourage young people to go into medicine.

Every year we have our annual Mercy-Douglas Lectureship and we identify one student from each of the colleges and we give a scholarship to that student.

And we're really looking for two things.

One is students who've done well academically but not just done well academically, but have been active in their local student National Medical Association chapter and have done things that advance the cause for decreasing disparities.

And also there's a lot of data that says that Black patients when taken care of by Black physicians do better.

- Sometimes you say the people you need to do XYZ and they'll say, "I'm not doing that."

Well maybe it's cultural so you need to take some time to try and find that out.

But when you see someone who looks like you, you say, "Okay, may perhaps they understand and I can get somewhere with this person."

And they may be more open to you.

- We feel like that's the goal of our youth programs is to make the healthcare professional community look like the community of the city.

One program is specifically for students who want to go into healthcare careers.

Another program is for students who are interested in STEM careers slightly more broadly including engineering.

Another one that's for LGBT identified youth.

And then we have one which is called the Girls one Diaspora program, which is for young women who are either first generation or newly immigrated to the country.

We are also just starting a new program for young male Black students who are interested in going into medicine but they all operate under the very similar model which is essentially using the resources of the college which is the museum, the library, and the fellows and the building to enhance their educational experience while they're in high school.

- Discrimination is not really just related to race I mean we discriminate against our mentally ill for instance.

The prisons are now a psychiatric hospitals.

This is a bominabo look at the rural poor in this country, regardless of race.

We got a whole lot to do.

(bright music) - [Gerald] The technology continues to evolve and we do amazing things.

But as far as access, it's a little bit distressing.

- If you don't know how to maneuver the system or know someone who can guide you through it, then you're lost.

People would come and if their family members died, they would say, "Oh I went to that hospital and my mother died.

They didn't take care of 'em."

But your mother came, she had one foot in the grave and one foot on the banana pill.

There was nothing we could do to save this person.

So they don't seek the healthcare until it's almost too late to save them.

- Looking at the European model, England other Germany, and oh, and here Canada.

I'm all in favor of university healthcare.

There's no reason why we can't have it.

What's pushing us to avoid this?

I don't really know.

I have some suspicions.

Once upon a time hospitals were like mercy things, charitable sort of things.

- If someone was sick or had a family member that was sick the doctors were always there to help you out.

Tell you which way to go, give you a discount or whatever they could do to help that person get better.

It was a very caring place.

(gentle music) - Mercy-Douglas, as well as his predecessors they offered a counter narrative of hope, of love and racial pride.

And I think that those are stories that we need to hold onto.

(gentle music) - [Announcer 1] Major funding for this program was provided by.