The University of Iowa History of Medicine Society invites you to hear Matthew Gambino speak on “These Strangers within our gates: Race, Psychiatry, and Mental Illness in Washington, D.C., 1900-1940”. 

Thursday, Dec. 1, 5:30-6:30 in Room 401 of the Hardin Library.

In the early decades of the 20th century, William Alanson White and his medical staff at St Elizabeths Hospital launched an ambitious program for psychiatry dedicated to the reconstruction of mentally-ill Americans for poor citizenship.  The racist assumptions beneath this program led most physicians to expect little more than deference, dependence and common labor from the black patients.  Acutely aware of the injustices they faced, black men and women rejected elements of the hospital’s regimen, simultaneously rejecting a social vision that consigned them to the margins of US civic life.