Dr. Charles Drew instructs Howard University interns during rounds.
In The Complexities of Physician Supply and Demand: Projections From 2019 to 2034, the association projects that the shortfall could be anywhere from 37,800 to more than 124,000 physicians nationwide by 2034. If there were enough Black doctors, perhaps that projected shortfall could be averted.
An estimated 35,000 Black medical school graduates may have been available by 2019 to increase the physician workforce in the country had some of the historically Black medical schools that trained them remained open, according to research published in a JAMA Network article, Projected Estimates of African American Medical Graduates of Closed Historically Black Medical Schools.
“During the first two decades of the 20th century, the number of medical schools that provided training to African-American students rapidly decreased, a development associated in part with the 1910 Flexner report, which recommended that, among the historically Black medical schools, only the Howard and Meharry programs should remain operational,” writes Dr. Kendall M. Campbell, senior associate dean for academic affairs for the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University, with colleagues.
Campbell and his fellow researchers conducted an observational economic evaluation of historically Black medical schools that shuttered after the Flexner report and four that remained open. They used steady and rapid expansion models to evaluate how the closures of these schools affected the number of Black medical school graduates.
Between the late 1800s and the early 1900s, there were 13 historically Black medical schools that operated in seven states, from Louisiana to Pennsylvania, according to the JAMA Network article. They shuttered after the Flexner Report, but before they did, the schools collectively graduated more than 700 Black doctors, the researchers found. Today, there are four historically Black medical schools in operation: Meharry Medical College, Howard University College of Medicine, Morehouse School of Medicine, and Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science. More are planned.
The Flexner Report, a book-length, landmark document published in 1910, evaluated U.S. medical schools and resulted in transformative changes to the entire medical education system with the recommendation to close about 75% of the nation’s medical schools, five Black medical colleges among them. Howard University in Washington, D.C., and Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tenn., were deemed worthy to survive. In the last century, Howard and Meharry trained most of the nation’s Black doctors.
