Heather Butts, assistant professor at Long Island University, lecturer at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and co-founder and executive director of H.E.A.L.T.H. for Youths, shares the stories of relatively unknown people of color who have had significant impact in medicine and public health throughout history.
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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Back in December, we awarded WNYC's first annual Lehrer Prize for Community Well-Being to Heather Butts, a Professor of Public Health and Public Health Law at St. John's and Columbia Universities, and Founder of the Group Health for Youths, which serves at-risk adolescents, usually from 18 to 21 years old, who were at turning points in their lives.
This semester, professor Butts is teaching a class at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health called Untold Stories in US Health Policy History, which introduces students to people of color, whose impact on public health have largely been laughed out of US history. She joins us now to tell a few of those stories, and she'll also update us on how the pandemic is affecting the lives of some of the young adults she works with at H.E.A.L.T.H for Youths and how the vaccine rollout is intersecting or not with that population. Hey, Heather, thanks for coming on again. Welcome back to WNYC.
Heather: Oh my gosh. Hi. How are you doing? It's such a pleasure to talk to you again. I know this is not the Brian Lehrer fan club hour, but I just want to let you know again, that being on your show and being a recipient of the award has actually done a ton for us as a nonprofit in terms of our ability to do the work we do. I just wanted to thank you again. When we talk about COVID and the youth we work with, you'll actually see the impact that your award has had on our population. I just want to, again, thank you and let you know you're making a difference.
Brian: Wow. Thank you for that. Of course, that is the goal of the award, is that it will have a positive impact on what the people in organizations, who are recipients, are able to do. Let's just right in jump to one of these untold stories, and then we'll zoom out to the bigger historical and structural picture. I see that you wrote an article in the Journal of The National Medical Association about Alexander Thomas Augusta, a physician, teacher, and human rights activist, who was, among other things, the first Black surgeon to serve in the Union Army during the Civil War. A name most people don't know, but very prominent in his circles.
I'll start with a question from the beginning of your article on him, "Born in 1825 in Norfolk, Virginia, he learned to read, secretly." That was something he would have had to do secretly in that time and place?
Heather: Yes. It's just so tragic. Alexander Thomas Augusta is a man that I'm sure probably no one in your audience has heard of, or very few have so, the ultimate in terms of an untold story. He was born in 1825 in Norfolk, Virginia, learned to write sort of literally under the cover of darkness, learned to read under the cover of darkness. Basically, he's one of these people that we don't hear about.
How I learned about him is, I went to Princeton undergrad and had a lovely time there. I went to law school, and then I went to Harvard to do my public health degree. Essentially, when I got to Harvard, I was going to do a paper for a class on basically looking at people who were doing work around public health and so forth. With a know-nothing paper ended up that I wanted to really focus on issues regarding Black surgeons during the Civil War and stumbled across Dr. Augusta.
At first, I actually thought it was sort of a mistake, because I had never heard of Black surgeons during the Civil War, and so did some more research found that actually important fact, he was a Black surgeon, he served during the Civil War. That is basically what took me to write this article about him, and then ended up taking me to write an entire book that I published a few years ago about Black surgeons during the Civil War. There were approximately 14 of them. People really don't know about any of them.
Brian: In the case of Dr. Augusta, I see he grew up to go to med school in Canada. Maybe that was easier for an aspiring Black doctor, even then, even in the North, in the US. I see he became hospital director of the medical college of Toronto by 1856. Then you tell us that in 1863, as the Civil War was raging, he wrote a letter to President Abraham Lincoln. Can you pick it up from there?
Heather: Actually it's interesting, because I'm doing a follow-up article with some colleagues in Canada about Dr. Augusta's wife. We're trying to piece together certain things, did he really write the letter, did he really write the photo, but the letter that he wrote to President Lincoln really exists. I actually have a copy of it in hand, physically in my hand, I'm looking at it.
Brian: That's a collectible.
Heather: The national archives has the copies of it as well. He wrote a letter to President Lincoln on January 7th, 1863. The letter essentially says that he wanted to be of service to his country, that he had left the United States to go to Canada to get his medical license, because he could not get it in the United States, applied to go to medical school at U Penn, was denied entry there, was denied entry to other schools, and so went to Canada, got his degree there, and then essentially, wanted to come back to the United States and serve his country that he loved dearly and fight for the rights of others.
It's just a really stunning story to think about somebody who- he had a very active pharmacy practice in Canada, he was extremely successful, his wife was a seamstress. She was just too successful, no reason for him to come back to the United States, a country that basically had left him sort of to fend for himself in terms of his career, and yet, wanted to come back to the United States and serve and get a commission in the US Army. It's an incredible story.
Brian: Lincoln got back to him and said, "Yes, come on down."
Heather: [laughs] Come on down. Exactly. 1863 versions of The Price Is Right? Exactly. "Come on down. We'd love to have you." Yes. It took a while. Again, it was an unusual circumstance for a Black surgeon to be able to get a commission in the army.
The most Black individuals that got some sort of position within the army actually were contract surgeons, but Augusta fought the good fight, actually got a commission and was commissioned as a major, and then came back to the United States and served and actually never went back to Canada, stayed in the United States for the rest of his life and died in Washington, D.C. in 1890, having served as a faculty member of Howard University, and had a lot of other amazing things he did, was one of the people who was instrumental in helping with the trolley cars being desegregated in the United States.
It's just an amazing, fantastic story that should be told more, and needs to be told more. I'm glad that I'm able to tell that story right now.
Brian: Let me ask you a little more about that trolley car incident before we go and get into at least one more of the people who you're teaching about in your Columbia course, Untold Stories and US Health Policy History, about Dr. Augusta, you quote a letter that a white officer sent to the secretary of war confused about how to deal with Dr. Augusta because Augusta outranked him. You used that as an example of how bigotry cast a veil over Dr. Augusta' dealings, even as successful as he was. Then you described in some detail that incident involving segregated trolley car, that made me think that he was kind of the Rosa Parks of 90 years before Rosa Parks. Is that a good analogy?
Heather: Yes, exactly. I love that you just said that. Exactly. This is the thing that I'm excited about in terms of the work that I do. A lot of us think that everything old is new again. We think that we're the first ones that ever thought of this idea and we're the only ones that ever fought the good fight.
Then you look at somebody like Alexander Augusta, who actually was instrumental in desegregating trolley cars in Washington, D.C. It came about because he was going to testify at a court-martial and was basically told to get off the trolley car because of its race. Then, when he finally trudged to the congressional hearings for this court-martial had a conversation with the congressman and attendance and basically said, and I say congressman because it was only congressman at the time,[laughs] that's not pejorative, but basically had a conversation with them and said, "I'm late to this court-martial because of racism and prejudice, and that I was thrown off a trolley car, and we should not let this happen to anyone anymore. If it weren't for racism and bigotry, I would have been here on time. This cannot be allowed to stand." He was instrumental in the desegregation of trolley cars in Washington D.C., in the 1860s.
Does anyone know that? I don't think so. I think very few people actually know that. Then when we look at somebody like Rosa Parks, who is an amazing, phenomenal, awesome figure, we can look to her and say, Rosa Parks 100 years before that, literally 100 years before that, with somebody like Alexander Augusta. That's why the Untold Stories are really incredible, because we always think that we might be the first, it's never been done before. If we know that there's a history behind it and there's a trajectory, then it doesn't make us feel hopefully so alone that we're just out there in a sea bobbing along by ourselves.
Brian: Dr. Alexander Thomas Augusta, who then, at the end of his life, became the first Black officer ranked soldier to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Heather: Correct.
Brian: He's the main example from Heather Butts' story, Untold Stories, of course, I should say main example from Heather Butts' Columbia University course on Untold Stories from Public Health that we'll have time for today. Let's take one other briefly. This time, a 20th-century example, Vivien Thomas, who helped to develop a surgical procedure at Johns Hopkins known as the Blue Baby operation. Who is he? Yes, it was a boy named Vivien. What operation was the Blue Baby?
Heather: This is another really interesting example of somebody whose story is more told part of Dr. Augusta. Basically, Vivien Thomas was assistant to a group of famous physicians at John Hopkins, who developed the housing shunt that we think of now, the housing shunt. It helps with babies who they are born and they are actually blue. How they deal with this is, they crouch. Normally, how you know they have this symptomatology is because they're in a crouching position because it helps them in terms of getting oxygen into and out of their lungs, and then helps with their circulatory system.
That's how you know that they have this symptomatology. Vivien Thomas was completely obliterated from the history books with this shunt that was created in order to help babies and young people who have this affliction just completely wiped out of history books until the last few years. There's a movie that came out several years ago called Something the Lord Made that gave him a little bit more of a notoriety.
There's also a PBS documentary, that's really great, that also speaks to his story, but it's taken a long time for him to get the level of recognition that he truly deserves. He's another person that we talk about along with numbers of other people whose stories have yet to be fully written and whose songs have not been sung. Another unfortunate, but hopefully to be rectified example.
Brian: I see that he was born in Louisiana in 1910, went to public school mostly in Nashville, see his early dreams of going to med school, got wiped out by the 1929 stock market crash of all things. There's a research program now named after him at the Morehouse School of Medicine. His life is inspiring others.
Heather: Exactly. Yes. The money he was going to save was going to be to go to medical school, wiped out in the crash, and then he had to basically build his life all over again, but an amazing, amazing story.
Brian: Before you go, we have a few minutes. I'd like to ask you briefly about your work at H.E.A.L.T.H for Youths with at-risk 18 to 21-year-olds and who you do college readiness and other work with, how much has the pandemic transformed life for any of them, or for that group in general, if there are generalizations that are worth being made?
Heather: It's really interesting, because I know one other thing we're going to talk about briefly was the issues of vaccine hesitancy. I don't know if we have time to talk about it.
Brian: Yes, that's part of it.
Heather: [unintelligible 00:15:15] goes in to some of this. The students that we work with-- Again, I'm going to point to the award that we got. Literally, one of the things we started after we got the award from you is a weekly college readiness program, because a lot of students were having a lot of difficulty figuring out how to upload forms, what schools they should be applying to. The common application has a new prompt about how the pandemic has affected you, so students weren't really sure how to answer that, and then obviously financial aid and what it means in this era of COVID. We started doing a weekly program on Saturdays, and anybody's welcome.
You're welcome to come to join us on Zoom, where we basically just started spending one, two, three, four hours talking with students about what they needed to do and how they needed to do it. Again, I thank you for the award, because that's one of the things we've been able to do in this new era after we were awarded, that was to be able to create this weekly program. It's been phenomenal and really answering some questions that students had. We're very grateful to be able to do that work.
Brian: What about vaccine hesitancy? We're seeing statistics just released over the weekend by the City of New York, showing the very low proportion of eligible Black and Latino New Yorkers who are actually getting vaccines compared to white and Asian New Yorkers. How are you seeing the expressions of either, not just hesitancy, but it's a combination of hesitancy and access? How are you seeing it in the families you work with?
Heather: Sure. Vaccine hesitancy is not new. One of the cases that I teach in my Public Health Law class is the case of Jacobson v. Massachusetts. It's a 1905 case with a pastor named Henning Jacobson who was vaccine-hesitant against smallpox. One of the things that I'm very interested in is looking at vaccine hesitancy in underserved communities, specifically. There's a lot of factors here.
Some of them have to do with something called "social laws" and whether or not you feel that if you don't do something, like get the vaccine or wear a mask, that people around you will be transformed in a negative way because you don't do it, so social laws. Also, there's an age issue. People over a certain age, if you're over the age of about 50, you probably got the smallpox vaccination, for example, and if you're under that age, you have not. COVID may be the first true pandemic that you've ever seen in this level, but if you're 50, 60, 70 years old, you know about smallpox and polio and really, really, really [unintelligible 00:18:18]--
Brian: We have 20 seconds left. Go ahead.
Heather: [laughs] Oh, no, it's always so quick. I would just say that underserved communities get really a short trip in terms of focus, and they have a lot of pain from previous traumas, and we need to help them work through that, and think about how we can deal with that, so for another day maybe. [laughs]
Brian: For another day, to be sure. Heather Butts back with us today after being here as the winner of the first Lehrer award for community well-being in December. She teaches at LIU and Columbia School of Public Health, and is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the group H.E.A.L.T.H. for Youths. We've been talking largely about the course she's teaching at Columbia this semester, Untold Stories in U.S. Health Policy History. Heather, always a pleasure. Thanks so much.
Heather: Thank you so much. Bye.
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