This memoir focuses on the various ways in which his being
an African American affected Tweedy’s medical education and early practice as a
medical resident and later in psychiatry. Raised in the relative safety and
privilege of an intact family, he found himself underprepared for some of the
blatant forms of personal prejudice and institutional racism he encountered in
his first years of medical education at Duke Medical School. One shocking moment he recounts in some
detail occurred when a professor, seeing him seated in the lecture hall,
assumed he’d come to fix the lights.
Other distressing learning moments occur in his work at a clinic serving
the rural poor, mostly black patients, where he comes to a new, heightened
awareness of the socioeconomic forces that entrap them and how their lives and
health are circumscribed and often shortened by those forces. Well into his early years of practice he
notices, with more and more awareness of social contexts and political forces,
how the color line continues to make a difference in professional life, though
in subtler ways. The narrative recounts clearly
and judiciously the moments of recognition and decision that have shaped his
subsequent medical career.
