AMA

“For leaders of the AMA, keeping abolition at arm’s length was critical to its existence. . . Crucial to this process of institution building was an association discourse that included defining the social identity of medical authority in relationship to the subordination of marginal groups – blacks and white women. . . the AMA as a distinctive space for white males (Haynes, 173) . . . AMA succeeded not in spite of slavery but, rather because of it. Its organization and discursive practice combined not only to secure the widest representation of states in the union, including the slave South, but also consolidated the social identity of medicine as white and male based on the subordination of blacks as well as women (176). . . . At the first convention in 1846, nearly a third of all state delegations came from the slave South (177). . . . One-half of the antebellum national meetings (seven out of fourteen) were held in cities of slaveholding and trading states in the South (178) . . . the discourse of the association circumscribed medical practice as an arena for the privileged few, namely, white males. . . The annual meetings became venues (among others) for inscribing black bodies as different and defending the institution of slavery (179). . . , [After the Civil War] the past practices of the AMA became a means to preserve its future. . . . the leaders of the association placed the future of the organization in the restoration of the antebellum social identity of American medicine. . . the exclusion of women and black doctors was central to its postwar viability” (187). . . . The present and future reality of regularly trained black practitioners challenged the social identity of medicine as white and male that was so fundamental to the antebellum association. For an organization, struggling to regain the support of Southern practitioners, it equally posed a destabilizing vision of the profession grounded in racial equality. The vote in May 1870 to exclude black and white members of the National Medical Society at the national meeting in Washington, D.C., affirmed Baldwin’s appeal to subordinate racial equality to the preservation of the future of the AMA and American medicine” (193).