Dr. Wanda Ramsey was more optimistic about the impact of the apology. The Catonsville physician, 50, is vice president of the Monumental City Medical Association, a chapter of the National Medical Association for Baltimore founded in 1942.
"I think if they're open and willing to work with us, especially with health care disparity being a big issue right now, I think a lot more can get done in terms of dealing with the health needs of the total population," she said. "I'm anxious to see how they will continue to extend themselves to working with black physicians."
Her father, Dr. Harold Ramsey, is a retired tumor surgeon who held leadership positions in the NMA. "I don't have anything so negative to say about the AMA except about what they did not do," the 80-year-old said, calling their problems ones of omission rather than commission.
Emerson C. Walden, a retired African-American doctor who lives in Columbia, worked for five decades in Baltimore as a surgeon. "It's long overdue. It's a step in the right direction," he said of the AMA's apology.
In the late 1940s, Walden was a resident at Provident Hospital - then the only hospital in Baltimore focused on caring for blacks. On Saturday nights, the 157-bed hospital often filled up, and Walden would call the doctor in charge at Johns Hopkins Hospital to see if there was room.
"He would call back," Walden remembered, "and say, 'I'm sorry, we don't have a single colored bed in the house.' " Walden would continue calling other hospitals until he found enough "colored" beds.
A spokesman for Hopkins, which was founded on a mandate to provide care for all citizens regardless of race, acknowledged the practice. "Like most hospitals of that era, Johns Hopkins segregated patients by color, a practice that we deeply regret today," said the spokesman, Gary Stephenson.
Walden also recalled that until the 1950s, he wasn't allowed to join the AMA or MedChi, the Maryland state medical society. He said he could never understand how fellow medical professionals could accept segregation. "How could a doctor, trained to work on all kinds of people, still be bigoted?"
liz.kay@baltsun.com david.kohn@baltsun.com
