February is a very busy cultural month! We’ve celebrated Lunar New Year, Mardi Gras and Carnival leading into Lent, and Maha Shivaratri, a Hindu festival. And if you don’t participate in any of those, I hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day or Presidents Day!
As you know, all of February is Black History Month. Our two D&I Grand Rounds this year have both addressed aspects of Black history in Durham. If you missed them, check out Drs. Smith Romocki and Waszak Geary speaking out Durham school desegregation (9/20/23) and Dr. Baker speaking about Duke Health’s history through a racial lens (1/24/24). You can find these recordings in the Grand Rounds Archive. Coming up this Wednesday, we will put it all together and hear from Dr. Edwin Aroke from the University of Alabama at Birmingham who will speak on how your zip code influences your health, leading to racial health disparities.
As February 3 was National Women Physicians Day, I wanted to specifically highlight the history of Black women in neurology. It turns out, very little information is available. I searched every way I could think of, and I cannot find out a very basic answer: who was the first Black woman to practice or be board certified in neurology. ChatGPT did answer the question, but it was a hallucination that did not hold up upon further investigation.
This is an example of the all-too-common problem of erasure. Erasure is the deliberate or systemic disregard of the experiences, achievements, and voices of certain groups, leading to their marginalization. While Solomon Carter Fuller is widely recognized as the first Black man to practice neurology (as a researcher who famously worked alongside Alois Alzheimer to describe the eponymous dementia), the first Black woman, as far as I can tell, has been lost to history. If any history of neurology scholars out there know this answer, please let me know.
I do want to highlight at least one pioneering Black woman neurologist to honor National Women’s Physician Day and Black History month, so I chose Audrey Penn, MD. Dr. Penn has the distinction of being the first Black woman to lead an institute of the NIH when she was acting director of the NINDS in 1998. A myasthenia gravis expert, she also served as president of the ANA in 1994. She spent the bulk of her career at Penn and Columbia.