I wrote this paper today as part of my course project for History 411: History of Science Activism with Professor Sigrid Schmalzer.
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In this context of community mental health care and other radical health movements, in April 1970, Bobby Seale as part of the Black Panther Party announced the founding of The People’s Free Medical Clinics (PFMC) to offer accessible, free, and quality healthcare for the disadvantaged people. In these clinics, medical professionals were not medical authority; instead, laypeople’s opinion and choices were valorized by the Party. Laypeople and medical professionals (non-experts and trusted experts) collaborated to construct experience and knowledge about health. The Party “re-educate[d]” (Nelson, 2011, 80) medical professionals by giving ideas of radical politics. Together, the Party, medical professionals, and non-expert community members promoted this knowledge about health to more people who (might) shared their political belief in free, local, and quality healthcare and in a “critique of medical authority, professionalization, and the medical–industrial complex.” (Nelson, 2011, 79)
PFMC was a response to the challenges in healthcare “including inadequate facilities, negligent care, and paternalistic (and sexist) interactions with medical authorities.” (Nelson, 2011, 76) The medically underserved people also faced “medical discrimination, ranging from disrespectful or incompetent treatment to unethical experimentation, in both private and public healthcare settings.” (Nelson, 2011, 78) Researcher, writer, and policy advisor Alondra Nelson wrote “The People’s Free Medical Clinics,” in Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (U. of Minnesota Press, 2011) to explain the operations of PFMC.
The Panthers re-educated medical professionals in partnership on radical ideologies to “build a bridge of understanding.” The Party offered theories as knowledge about health for professionals. Nelson argued that “…as former Harlem Panther Cleo Silvers explained to me, the Party also sought to ‘reeducate’ the medical professionals who partnered with them by exposing them to the ideas of Mao Zedong, Frantz Fanon, and other political thinkers.” (Nelson, 2011, 80)
This reeducation of knowledge about health happened mutually and reciprocally. “Silvers explained how this reciprocal interchange between medical professionals and Panthers worked: I was responsible for giving political education to the doctor’s collective [that] had agreed to work with us . . . [and] they taught us. The doctors taught us to use the equipment. We didn’t come up with these ideas about the results of the ingestion of lead poisoning [by] ourselves, the doctors who did the research brought the [information] to us. We broke it down and explained it to the community and acted on it: We did this as a group. We had a doctor, a nurse, a community person and a Young Lord or a Panther. The Party thus held a pivotal place in the radical health community, linking the medically underserved and the wider health movement.” (Nelson, 2011, 87)
Community members including patients and volunteers worked with medical professionals in developing knowledge about health. The Panthers served as a bridge between these two groups and shared partnerships with them. “…at Party clinics volunteer medical professionals trained community health workers to provide basic healthcare; this transmission of expert knowledge was central to the Panthers’ health politics.” (Nelson, 2011, 79) Nelson argued that “the operation of the clinics would have been impossible without collaboration with its trusted experts, such as members of the MCHR. As the Panthers’ health work bore out, the Party did not reject medicine outright; rather, it sought to provide and model respectful and reliable medical practice.” (Nelson, 2011, 79) Nelson continued that “the Panthers partnered with health activists who were able to impart the knowledge necessary to administer Party initiatives and who also shared its commitment to patient empowerment to demystify medicine, to the deprofessionalization of medical practice, and to a conception of healthcare as a human right, rather than a commodity.” (Nelson, 2011, 80)
When operating PFMC, the Party also got help from “activist–professionals in the radical health movement” who served “as personal physicians to cadre.” (Nelson, 2011, 80) These movements included MCHR and the Student Health Organization. Nelson argued that the Panthers provided the activist-professionals with opportunities to serve the underserved and thus realize their “political aims to assist medically underserved communities.” (Nelson, 2011, 80)
In PFMC, medical authority as a piece of knowledge about health was demystified; laypeople’s wisdom was valued. This process took the paths of “first, the valorization of nonexperts’ experience over physicians’ expert knowledge, and second, and related to this, the promotion of the practice of self-help healthcare, or ‘self health.’” (Nelson, 2011, 88)
For valorization, “…activists encouraged patients to have a voice in the medical encounter and urged laypeople to claim the mantle of expertise by taking a hand in their healthcare— and, sometimes, in producing medical knowledge as well. The democratization of both medical practice and biomedical knowledge, often in the clinic setting, was a tactical cornerstone of radical health politics. Members of the radical health movement worked in solidarity— and sometimes, in tandem— to provide inexpensive alternatives to mainstream medicine.” (Nelson, 2011, 82) Nelson continued that “in free clinic examination rooms in Berkeley and elsewhere, patients learned to ask questions of the health professionals who treated them; they ‘frequently challenge[d] the behavior of professionals’ if they found it to be inappropriate and, furthermore, were encouraged to do so. Additionally, during the height of the radical health movement, it was not uncommon for health workers to be dismissed from activist- run clinics if they were deemed disrespectful to patients. ‘We…require[d] the best from the doctors,’ Armour recollected. ‘People started complaining about…one pediatrician that came to work for us. The parents were complaining about some things that he said about their kids…Have you ever heard of firing a volunteer? I had to tell him we didn’t need his services anymore!’” (Nelson, 2011, 88)
Specifically, the white coat as a symbol of medical authority was demystified in PFMC. “Because the Party worked with populations that historically had not had regular contact with medical professionals, the white coat, worn by trusted experts, could be a welcome sign of long-sought access to quality healthcare as well as an emblem of the potential excesses of medical power. Accordingly, at the Party’s clinics, community volunteers, health workers, and Panther health cadre alike donned this symbol of medical science that had evolved from late-nineteenth-century lab coats.” (Nelson, 2011, 84)
For promoting the practice (knowledge) of self-health (health in people’s hands), Nelson invited a historical actor in PFMC, Armour, to describe the practice. ‘Know your body, know thyself. Own your own speculum. Do your own examinations,’ Armour remembered. She continued, ‘We practiced doing Pap smears on each other. And then, we sent them to the lab [for results].’ This would prove a life- saving practice for Armour, who was able to detect her own cervical cancer at an early stage. ‘Had I not been doing [self- examination], I might not even be here today,’ Armour revealed to me.” (Nelson, 2011, 89)
In PFMC, medical authority was demystified and laypeople’s wisdom was valued. Medical professionals and community members collaborated to contribute their experience and knowledge about health. The Party connected both and reeducated the medical professionals about radical ideologies, also receiving reciprocal education from them.
Bibliography
Alondra Nelson, “The People’s Free Medical Clinics,” in Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (U. of Minnesota Press, 2011), 75-114.