Dr. Myeisha Taylor couldn’t help but take notice the day she spotted her then 4-year-old daughter, riveted on the TV screen and mimicking a brown-skin cartoon character who, herself, was suited in a white physician’s coat and floating through the front door after a day’s work.
Never mind that that animated Disney Junior character, Dottie “Doc” McStuffins, was registering stuffed animals’ heartbeats with a pink toy stethoscope and was doing so with the kind of precision that imparts real lessons on the science of healing. That just might stir a preschooler’s curiosity and, even then, shape her career trajectory, said Taylor, founder of what has become a global project to push more female physicians of color into the pipeline.
“What captured my attention is that the ideas they introduce are pretty accurate, even if they teach it in pre-school language,” said Taylor, an emergency room doctor in suburban Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas. “After I watched I realized this cartoon character’s mother was a doctor, coming home in her white coat and asking ‘What’s your dad cooking?’ That’s my life.”
Given the disproportionately lower rates of wellness among people of color than among Whites—driven by everything from lack of finance to insufficient self-care to lingering distrust of mainly White-run medical institutions—Taylor has co-launched a campaign aimed at urging more students of color to pursue medicine and to create means of putting medical school within their reach.
Since its somewhat accidental launch—it all started with a Facebook collage of 131 Black women doctors thanking Disney for making Doc McStuffins a Black girl—the We Are Doc McStuffins Project & Artemis Medical Society has achieved a global membership of more than 2,400 women who either are practicing medical, osteopathic or naturopathic physicians or enrolled in those respective medical schools. While 90 percent are in those fields, the rest are in other areas of medicine.
“I was just intuitively inclined toward becoming a doctor,” said Artemis Society co-founder Dr. Erikka Magra, who practices emergency medicine at the U.S. Naval Base in Naples, Italy. Coming up, she was one of a handful of Blacks in her San Diego schools. Her doctor was White and a wonderful caregiver. His race didn’t factor into her decision as much as her view of science as very cool stuff.
For those who seem, on the surface, less scientifically inclined, exposure to doctors from their own environs and background, though, is key.
