Race and medical practice in Kansas City's Free Dispensary

Patient records from the Kansas City Free Dispensary, 1906-1912, provide material for a case study of race in early twentieth-century medicine. The dispensary was a free, racially integrated medical clinic operated for educational purposes by the University of Kansas. Little historical work has been done examining the role of race in routine medical practice. Medical records give insight to the development of durable clinical habits and rules of thumb. Practitioners at the Kansas City Free Dispensary showed clear racial inequities in their care, for example in the treatment of pain, but they did not acknowledge or explain their practices, although the necessary rhetoric and justifications lay close at hand. The author speculates that the disavowal of scientific racism in medicine in decades to follow may have done little to dislodge habits that became embedded in informal clinical judgments.