A History of San Diego’s Black Medical Community
An excerpt from Remarkable Healers on the Pacific Coast: A History of San Diego’s Black Medical Community by Robert Fikes, Jr.*
In August 2009, a front-page article in the San Diego Union-Tribune announcing the region’s history-making paired-donor kidney transplants featured a color photo of Dr. Marquis E. Hart, a former director of the University of California San Diego’s Abdominal Transplant Program who, along with another transplant physician, pulled off the feat. That same month Dr. Wilma Wooten, San Diego County’s Public Health Officer serving 3.1 million residents and often seen on local television, used the media to warn residents to take precautions to prevent the spread of swine flu virus, to inform them of a substantial increase in cases of whooping cough, and to report a second case of West Nile virus. The rise to prominence of Hart and Wooten, among other notable African-American doctors in the area, is the most recent example of extraordinary achievements against the odds stretching back more than a century with the arrival of the county’s first black doctor in 1899.
*Robert Fikes, Jr. is Senior Assistant Librarian, San Diego State University and the author of “Black Pioneers in San Diego: 1880-1920” in The San Diego Historical Society Quarterly (Spring 1981). Fikes is well known nationally for his research and publications regarding African-American history and culture and is a 2007 recipient of the San Diego State University Alumni Association Award for Outstanding Faculty Contributions.
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