Dean Flier (left) with diversity award winners Winfred Williams, Robert Kitts, Michael Leslie, Christopher Lathan, Barbara Sweeny and Ranna Parekh. Not pictured: Michael Greenberg. Image: Jeff Thibeault
In starkly contrasting counterpoint, the 2014-2015 Howard, Dorsey, Still Lecture and Diversity Awards Ceremony held at Harvard Medical School celebrated the efforts and achievements of those at the School who worked hard to promote diversity in the last year, while exploring the roots of American academic medicine in the brutalities of slavery.
Jeffrey S. Flier, dean of HMS, acknowledged the remarkable, inspirational contributions of the faculty and staff honored with awards in his welcoming remarks.
“Not only has their work and commitment brought meaningful change to the HMS community, they have also shown us how diversity can enrich all our lives,” Flier said.
Joan Reede, HMS dean for diversity and community partnership, noted that the actions of the award winners echoed the ideals of leadership, creating positive change and making health care and education accessible to all that were embodied in the careers of Edwin Howard, Thomas Dorsey and James Still, the first African-American graduates of Harvard Medical School in the late 19th century. The annual event is named in their honor.
This year’s Howard, Dorsey, Still Lecture was delivered by Craig Steven Wilder, professor and chair of the history faculty in MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences and the author of Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America’s Universities.
Craig’s lecture, “Slavery After Death: The Unfree Origins of American Medicine,” described the role that blacks played in the birth of academic medicine in the Americas.
“One of the things I’ve struggled with is how to tell the story of the relationship between the American academy and slavery, without hiding the brutalities of slavery in the rise of the institutions that we cherish,” Wilder said.
In the early years of American medicine in the 18th and 19th century, Wilder said, the bodies of African-Americans, Native Americans and the poor, were used without consent for anatomical research and even for curios and decorations in schools because those populations were not given any value or protected by society.
African-American and Native American bodies were also used as evidence of the supposed differences between the races, he said.
“Social and scientific racism demanded desecration,” Wilder said.
While these are hard truths to tell, Wilder said, it is important to hear them.
“It is crucial to acknowledge this history of brutality so that we know where we have come from, just as it is essential to celebrate the efforts of people like this year’s award winners, who are creating a different kind of future,” Reede said.
This year’s award winners, recognized for their outstanding efforts to promote diversity and inclusion at HMS, were drawn from HMS faculty and staff and its affiliated hospitals. A full listing of the honorees follows.
2014-2015 DIVERSITY AWARDS RECIPIENTS
Diversity Lifetime Achievement Award
Winfred Williams, Jr.
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital
Harold Amos Faculty Diversity Award
Michael Greenberg
Nathan Marsh Pusey Professor of Neurobiology
Christopher Lathan
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Michael Leslie
Instructor in Psychiatry, McLean Hospital
Ranna Parekh
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital
Executive Committee of the Program for Research Assistant Development and Achievement (PRADA) ~ acknowledging, in particular, the work of:
Robert Li Kitts
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Boston Children’s Hospital
Sharon P. Clayborne Staff Diversity Award
Barbara Sweeny
Program Coordinator, Office of Recruitment and Multicultural Affairs, Program in Medical Education
