Sound Ethics: Book: The Good Doctors Until the late 1960s,
African American doctors were not permitted to belong to county
medical associations. And since it was those local associations
that granted hospital privileges, African American physicians
often were not permitted to admit patients to white-run
hospitals in the south. It wasnít until 1968 that the American
Medical Association was pressured to change this policy, in part
by the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR). Historian John
Dittmer is the author of a book on that chapter of American
history, called "The Good Doctors." Today Dittmer tells Sound
Medicineís Dr. Eric Meslin that the MCHR was made up of
volunteer doctors from the north who had their own version of a
civil rights freedom ride.