A Black ophthalmologist, Howard Phillip Venable, MD, joins the School of Medicine faculty. Later, he is promoted to assistant clinical professor of ophthalmology. He is also a longtime physician at Homer G. Phillips Hospital and is director of ophthalmology there when the hospital closes in 1979. Howard Phillip Venable oral history audio recording available via […]
Bernard Becker, MD, a white physician, arrives at Barnes Hospital to head ophthalmology and is dismayed by the segregation he finds in McMillan Hospital. He threatens to leave unless integration occurs, and McMillan quickly desegregates. Later, he said: “I faced a good deal of opposition from my own visiting staff. I had to keep at […]
Wanda Hall is the first Black student to graduate from Washington University School of Nursing. She earns a master’s degree in 1953 and joins the faculty as an instructor in psychiatric nursing.
Edgar R. Thomas becomes the first Black medical student at the School of Medicine but transfers after his first year, going on to earn a bachelor’s degree in biology and a master’s degree in zoology from Washington University. Image: Edgar R. Thomas
James Whittico, MD, is the first Black fellow in surgery. The first Black male physicians join the School of Medicine faculty: J. Owen Blache, MD, in pathology, George A. Gaikins, MD, in surgery and Edward B. Williams, MD, in internal medicine. Images: James Whittico, MD | J. Owen Blache, MD
Ernest St. John Simms, a Black researcher, joins the medical school’s research staff, later contributing to the Nobel-Prize-winning research of Arthur Kornberg. Simms is named a research assistant professor in 1968, becoming the first Black person to hold a full-time academic appointment at the school, and is named an associate professor in 1971. Image: Ernest […]
Helen E. Nash, MD, becomes the first Black woman to join the School of Medicine faculty and the first Black attending physician at Children’s Hospital, where she serves for more than 40 years. A trainee of Homer G. Phillips Hospital, she becomes a hugely impactful physician and mentor and establishes scholarships for students interested in […]
The Department of Ophthalmology at Washington University discovers it has inadvertently admitted a Black physician, James W. Nofles, MD, to its three-week postgraduate course. The School of Medicine decides to declare that the medical school is desegregated. Image: James W. Nofles, MD
The report “Higher Education for American Democracy,” commissioned by President Harry S. Truman, recommends that “federal appropriations [should] be given only to those schools willing to comply” with desegregation. Washington University dissents, saying that the university “disagreed with any recommendation as to the immediate abandonment of segregation” and that dismantling of inequality must be made […]
Washington University’s Robert Elman, MD, chief of surgery at Homer G. Phillips Hospital from 1937 to 1955, is one of many white Jewish physicians who treat patients there alongside Black physician colleagues. “Excellence in one’s own field, small as it may be, is the best and perhaps the only way in which each individual can […]