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 Augustus A. White, III, M.D., Ph.D. is currently distinguished professor of orthopedic surgery and medical education at Harvard Medical School and former professor of health science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For the past decade, Dr. White has been a leader in the national fight for equality in health care. This is the subject of his new book (with David Chanoff) Seeing Patients: Unconscious Bias in Health Care (Harvard University Press, January 2011).
White grew up in Memphis, Tennessee during the era of hard core segregation. He attended the Mt. Hermon School for Boys in northeastern Massachusetts, where he and four other boys "of color" were accepted in 1949. From there White attended Brown University, where he was the first black president of his traditionally white fraternity, and graduated from Stanford Medical School, where he was that institution's first African American student. Subsequently he trained at Yale Medical Center becoming the first black surgical resident and, later, Yale's first African American professor of surgery.
In the interim White served as a combat surgeon in Vietnam, was decorated with a Bronze Star, and earned a doctorate doing advanced spine research at Sweden's University of Gothenburg and Karolinska Institute. In 1978 White was tapped to head the orthopedic surgery department at Boston's Beth Israel (now Beth Israel Deaconess) Hospital, one of the major Harvard teaching hospitals.
As one of the world's leading spine specialists, White has written over 250 articles and book chapters. He has also authored the definitive textbook, Clinical Biomechanics of the Spine (with Manohar Panjabi) and a book, for back pain sufferers, Your Aching Back: A Doctor's Guide To Relief (with Preston Phillips, MD), now in its third edition. He was the founder and first president of the J. Robert Gladden Orthopedic society, past president of the Cervical Spine Research Society and first chairman of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeon's committee on diversity. He is the recipient of the Academy's Tipton Award for Leadership, Stanford Medical School's Lifetime Achievement Award for Exceptional Contributions to Medicine, and numerous other awards and honorary degrees. |
