Despite current data showing that physician diversity does improve patient care, and reduce health care disparities, the current demographics of the profession fail to reflect the population of Canada as a whole, including the proportion of Black Canadians.
Notwithstanding, the racial homogeneity of the medical profession did not occur by chance; rather, it is the product of discriminatory policies that have systematically prevented Black and other racialized students from pursuing medical training.
History has revealed that discriminatory admission policies were common in North American medical schools well into the middle of the twentieth century, and to present day and time these continue to have a measurable impact on the number of Black medical school graduates.
Science education (including medicine) have ceded conversations on race and racism to the humanities and social sciences. In the almost 200-year history of medical education in Canada, structures remain in place that obstruct Black people from participation in medical training.
Medical Schools
Queen’s University
The University Senate at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario voted in 1918 to ban Black students from being admitted to the medical program. The blame for such a decision was due to the racial intolerance of local white residents, who did not want any physical contact with Black physicians. There was also another key factor influencing the Senate’s decision.
The American Medical Association (AMA) a professional medical organization that rated medical schools in both Canada and the U. S. wanted Queen’s to expel Black students. Founded in 1847, the AMA did not welcome Black physicians until the late 1960s. This racist restriction remained practice at Queen’s until 1965.
The policy stayed on the books until 2018, although it was not enforced. On April 16, 2019 in a special ceremony Queens University apologized for the past wrong done and the many people affected by the 1918 ban barring Black medical students.
Even after 1965, archival evidence suggests the historical facts of the ban were misrepresented by the university when confronted with the issue in 1978, 1986, and 1988. In 2018, Edward Thomas, a Queen’s PhD candidate presented his research findings to the current Queen’s Senate and brought to light the motion’s continued existence, the university then formally rescinded the resolution that enabled the ban.
Family members of individuals affected by the ban received personal letters of apology, and the School of Medicine now houses an exhibit addressing the ban and its impacts. Course curricula now places greater focus on diversity, equity, and inclusivity. The School of Medicine established a mentorship program in March 2019, through which Black faculty members have volunteered to serve as mentors to Black medical students enrolled at the University as they progress through clerkship, residency, and into the medical profession. Additionally, an admissions award has also been created for Black Canadian students entering into the first year of undergraduate medical education.
Recipients will be awarded up to $10,000, based on academic achievement and demonstrated financial need. In a blog post published in advance of the ceremony, Dean Reznick wrote: “As an institution, we can never undo the harm that we caused to generations of Black students, and we have to accept that our actions contributed to the inequities in the medical profession that still exist today.”
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto also denied admission to Black applicants . This policy was vividly portrayed in a letter of correspondence regarding the 1923 application of Lean Elizabeth Griffin, an African American woman. In the letter, Assistant Dean and Secretary of the Faculty of Medicine Edward Stanley Ryerson pushed Registrar James Brebner to reject Griffin’s application.
They had not realized that Griffin was “colored” when she first applied. Ryerson justified himself by stating that “Colored students are a problem when they get to the hospital.” The University launched The Black Student Application program, the first of its kind in Canada aimed at encouraging more applications from Black students, as well as supporting Black student representation. The program was inaugurated for the 2017-2018 MD program admissions cycle.
Dalhousie University
At Dalhousie University between 1911 to 1931, racist restrictions were implemented under University President Stanley Mackenzie. Black students who were not British subjects were denied entry to the medical school.
In the 1930s, only one hospital in Nova Scotia (The Tuberculosis Hospital) allowed Black medical students to complete their internship there. In 2016, the UN sent a Working Group to visit several Canadian cities with sizeable Black populations, including Ottawa, Toronto, Halifax, and Montreal.
In its inquiry, the Working Group met with student bodies, trade unions, women’s, religious, community, and other groups. It examined the state of Black Canada under several rubrics: the criminal justice system, hate crimes, disparities in access to education, health care, housing, and employment. It further included an additional rubric, that of the multiple and intersecting forms of racial discrimination.
In 2017, the UN issued its report on the state of Blackness in Canada with all-negative findings. The Working Group made several dozen recommendations, the first of which called on the government of Canada to “issue an apology to the Black community and consider providing reparations to African Canadians for enslavement and historical injustice. To date not one governmental, quasi-governmental body in Canada, be it federal, provincial, religious, political, social or civil has acknowledged and responded to the UN Human Rights Council report on Black Canada. The silence is deafening.
Mc Gill University
Mc Gill thrives on the reputation of being one of the top medical schools in Canada, hence it is no epiphany that admission is highly competitive, with an acceptance rate of approximately five per cent every year. Until the 1850s, McGill College was almost exclusively a Faculty of Medicine One of the most underrepresented groups in medicine is the Black community. Systematic racism and discrimination have stacked the odds against prospective Black students, who have historically made up less than two percent of students admitted into McGill’s medical school.
There were periods of time in which Black students were admitted to and excluded from McGill University. In 1916 as part of the restrictions imposed on Black medical students, the Montreal Maternity Hospital, the obstetrics teaching hospital attached to Mc Gill University, was successful in barring Black male students from gaining admission in the 1920s, the Bahamas Legislature voted to remove McGill from the institutions where its government scholarships were tenable, and specifically wrote to the university to inquire if Black students were excluded. During a 1930 visit to Trinidad, Quebec former politician and newspaper publisher Henri Bourassa fielded questions about an unnamed Canadian University – not Laval or Université de Montréal and assumed to be McGill – that excluded Black students.
The small number of elite Black students accepted at McGill were notified about arrangements to complete their clinical work at a “Negro hospital” in the United States if a local Montreal hospital objected to their presence. In particular, there was an arrangement between the McGill Faculty of Medicine and Howard University.
In at least one known case, the local UNIA financially supported a McGill medical student to do his internship at the newly opened African-American Homer G. Phillips Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. No Black medical students interned at the Royal Victoria Hospital from the early 1930s until 1947. Mc Gill University went on to adopt racial restrictions in admissions of Black students in the 1920s-1930and again from 1945 until the early 1960’s .
In 1848 William Wright born in Quebec City, graduated from McGill’s Faculty of Medicine, becoming the first person of colour to earn a medical degree in British North America (now Canada).
