Speaker: Adam Biggs
Lecture Title: “Healing the New Negro: Black Doctors, Racial Reform, and the Uses of ‘Modern’ Medicine”

📅 Date & Time: Wednesday, February 11th, 2026, at Noon
📍 Location: MUSC Library, 4th Floor, Room 424 and live stream on Zoom
🍕 Lunch will be provided for in-person attendees!

This talk explores how black doctors used professional medicine to advocate for racial justice in the early-twentieth century. It places their professional endeavors at the intersection of two concurrent historical trends—the Flexner Era reforms and the New Negro Movement, an effort by black civic leaders to reconstruct the public image their race in accordance with standards of modernity. More than a literary trope of the Harlem Renaissance, I argue, black doctors relied on the New Negro as a model for health, healing, and professional legitimacy and, with it, sought to assure their patients that professional medicine could offer relief from the most salient afflictions they faced, the endemic effects of American racism.