Graduate Medical Education at Meharry Medical College

A Residency Pioneer

Residency training opportunities at Meharry Medical College have expanded enormously since the professional school's infancy.  Meharry could accommodate two, no more than three "interns" in any given year during the early 20th century.  Indeed, laws and customs everywhere restricted graduate training opportunities for black healthcare professionals.

Three non-minority hospitals - Cook County in Chicago and Harlem and Bellevue in New York City - employed black interns in the 1920s.  Only 68 internship slots were available to African American physicians at the dozen accredited black hospitals, including Meharry's Hubbard Hospital - a number well below the black medical student population graduating annually.  Hubbard Hospital could accept a miniscule number of interns each year.  A few additional positions were available at John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital at Tuskegee (Ala.) Institute.   

  In 1936, Meharry pioneered the idea of offering black physicians postgraduate seminars covering recent trends in medical practice.  Still later, Meharry-trained physicians co-founded and staffed a medical facility in all-black Mound Bayou, Miss., to care for the medically underserved population there and to provide clinical experiences for Meharry students and graduates.

  Notwithstanding egregious artificial barriers and debilitating fiscal exigencies, Meharry increased internship/residency opportunities concurrent with the growth and progress of the College itself.  As Graduate Medical Education achieved departmental status and as the oversight of the Accrediting Council of Graduate Medical Education became more focused, postgraduate training at Meharry began to flourish in 1975 and has remained stable ever since.     

Today fully accredited residency programs are available at the Meharry School of Medicine in six specialties: internal medicine, psychiatry, family practice, preventive medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, and occupational medicine.  The School of Dentistry offers two fully accredited residency programs in oral and maxillofacial surgery and general practice residency.