Mary Susan Malahlela: practising medicine under apartheid

Abstract

Until well into the 20th century, the only way Black South Africans could train as doctors was to travel abroad. This was an expensive option and there were few scholarships, so the numbers remained small. Not until 1941 did South African medical schools agree to admit a small minority of students of Indian or African ancestry. One of the first through the doors at the University of Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg was Mary Susan Malahlela. In 1947, she became the first Black woman to qualify in South Africa. The next year the government introduced its racist policy of apartheid, and she pursued her entire medical career against a background of extreme racial segregation and inequality. After Malahlela's death, her daughter told a reporter that when Malahlela graduated, her class photograph—a Black woman amid a sea of white men—appeared in the local Afrikaans newspaper, captioned “The black danger”. Women making medical history: introducing A Woman's PlaceIn December, 2017, The Lancet issued a call for papers for its special theme issue on women in science, medicine, and global health .1 The Comment outlined the gender inequalities in medicine that still persist, long after many overt barriers to women's participation have fallen. While that theme issue will be forward-looking, I believe we can also gain insights from looking to the past for examples of women who have made their mark against the odds, and by asking what it was about their particular circumstances that enabled them to do so. Full-Text PDF Rebecca Lee Crumpler: first Black woman physician in the USAA passionate vocation to care for others and a desire to empower her patients drove Rebecca Lee Crumpler (1831–95) to overcome 19th-century prejudice against her gender and ethnicity and qualify as “doctress of medicine” (the term she used), the first African American woman to do so. Crumpler gained extensive experience treating destitute former enslaved people in the southern states after the end of the American Civil War, and published A Book of Medical Discourses: in Two Parts, a practical guide to the care of infants and women's health. Full-Text PDF