Journal Voices in the Civil Rights Era — New Horizons and Limits in Medical Publishing

D uring the social tumult of the 1960s and 1970s, many people in the United States began demanding a more egalitarian restructuring of society, including its many manifestations of racism.American medicine was not exempt, and the Journal opened its pages to advocates of reform in the profession and to civil rights activists fighting on the front lines.The shift, however, was hardly linear.The Journal also continued to publish material ref lecting more reactionary and conventional ways of thinking.Like the larger medical profession, it found that the new reform impulse did not mean a complete break with a troubled racial past. Medical Civil Rights Activism in the Early-to-Mid-1960sU.S. hospitals remained racially segregated into the 1960s, with Black patients admitted to different wards from White patients or excluded altogether.][3] In the early 1960s, the Journal published correspondence and commentaries on hospital segregation.