If you'll forgive the delay, it's time for your doctor's appointment.
You will have to again forgive me, or you will find your heart and mine beating at once, because while I must maintain objectivity at my day job and avoid making race or gender a big deal for my freelance work, ...
it is absolutely a big deal to be a doctor in 19-goddamn-37. (If that isn't a real year, by God it should be.)
And it is absolutely a big deal to be pushing people to eat better back before doctors were pushing people to stop smoking.
And it is absolutely a big deal to be running a practice in the inner city.
And it is absolutely a huge deal to be doing all of these things while black and a woman.
Understand:
1937? Separate but equal was being chipped away at, but it was 18 years away from going the way of slavery. One of the lawyers in the case had been working for the NAACP for a year. We would later call him Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall.
1937? Franklin Roosevelt was newly another in a string of presidents re-elected to a second term. The first female cabinet secretary had come in 1933.
1937? If Dr. Muriel Petioni had been born in or moved to a state south of Maryland, voting would have been unlikely at best. Becoming a doctor?
Well, I've learned something in writing about these people who went around doing things other people hadn't done.
They do what they do, and other people get in the way at their own expense. It's actually kind of funny.
The thing about being a doctor is you see a lot of people.
The thing about being a doctor is a lot of those people are women.
The thing about being a doctor is you know girls grow up to be women.
The thing about being a doctor is if you have a lot of patients who start out as young girls, they grow up seeing what you do and thinking they maybe could do it too. Even if whoever's at home emphasizes something else, they have grown up having "Black women can become doctors" as a sentence that not only makes sense but has proof attached to it.
And if those young girls become young women become women become mothers, you know and I know and they know and Dr. Petioni knew what happens:
More black women become doctors.
It's not just that, though.
It's not about the direct, generational change one person can bring about.
It's not about seeing someone who looks like you and trusting that person more and helping that person find out early about the problems everyone else in inner cities is going to be dealing with.
It's not even just about black girls who have black fathers and how the dynamic of a female doctor encourages the father to shed restrictive concepts about life stations that you and I and God and everyone knows were being reinforced pretty heavily back in the day when a black woman in medical school was the black woman in your medical school class.
It's about Petioni and piles of other female doctors working then to give us now.
Now, because of a doctor who was born in Trinidad around when World War I was breaking out, and -- yes -- because of the people she inspired to become doctors or mothers or lawyers or teachers or whatever they were good at
and because of the people who inspired her and set their own chains of people down the paths that were right for them
and because of the facilities they required and that required them, and the changes those places introduced, and the opportunities they brought into the light kicking and screaming or jumping for joy and shrieking with delight
many people who are not white men find some insult in making a big, honorable deal of a black woman being whatever or a black man doing whatever or a white woman saying whatever.
And while I understand and appreciate the point -- that making a big, honorable deal of it makes it seem rare and thus sort of contributing to its sense of otherness, as if black people should not be expected to go into fields like medicine -- it was rare. Because:
Muriel Petioni followed her father’s path, graduating from Howard University Medical School in 1937, the only woman in her class.
Because it was rare.
Because:
In 1942, she married Mallalieu S. Woolfolk, a Tuskegee Airman ...
Because there were Tuskegee Airmen to marry because they were noteworthy because how many other black pilots were there in World War II?
Because:
“I would give people as much time as they needed,” she said. “If you had your heart and mind bursting and needed to talk to someone who was a physician, not bleeding in the body but bleeding in mind and soul, I would listen. I wasn’t brilliant. I wasn’t the best physician in the world, but I was nice enough to make people feel good.”
Because this is still the most important quality in a physician, assuming medical competence as a standard.
Because everything aside, Muriel Petioni was a damn good doctor. If she had not been a damn good doctor, she would not have been doing her thing in her 80s in the inner city.
If you like, who gives a shit that she was a black woman? And if you like, it's crucial that she was a black woman.
But if you please, remember:
During a career of more than half a century, Dr. Petioni worked as a school physician for the city’s health department, maintained her private practice, and was a founder or leader of many community organizations promoting health care, housing development and education in Harlem. She mentored dozens of black medical students, went to public schools to tell young people to think about becoming doctors, and founded the Friends of Harlem Hospital, an organization that remains a bulwark against budget-cutting threats to that city-run hospital’s existence.
Show me a doctor I haven't written about who did more as a person for people.
(Really, do. I may go write-sprinting again. I found some people, and ... y'know.)