Career
Even with his extensive medical knowledge, Sweet encountered difficulty finding work at a hospital due to his race, but his summers waiting at Detroit restaurants instilled him with the knowledge of Black Bottom’s need for medical care. Black Bottom was an overpopulated black ghetto in which migrant workers from the South made their homes during the Great Migration. These proto ghettos were extremely poor areas, being unsanitary with few sources of water, not to mention that they were mainly built in places that were environmentally unhealthy. Overpopulation and the steady influx of migrants, who lacked medical care amid cramped quarters, caused diseases and created imminent threats to life. According to Kevin Boyle in Arc of Justice, “rudimentary care could have saved some of them. But Black Bottom didn’t get even that.” Sweet saw this as an opportunity to practice his medicine. He gave US$100 to a pharmacy, “Palace Drugs”, in exchange for office space. His first client, Elizabeth Riley, feared she had contracted tetanus because her jaw grew stiff. Sweet was able to diagnose that it was not an infection, but rather simply a dislocated jaw. He reset the bone which spread good publicity about his practice throughout the neighborhood. His list of patients grew, and "Ossian was named a medical examiner for Liberty Life Insurance, an appointment that assured him a steady stream of patients he might not have otherwise have acquired." According to Boyle, Sweet earned the respect of his colleagues at Dunbar Memorial.
Read more about this topic: Ossian Sweet, Biography
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“They want to play at being mothers. So let them. Expressing tenderness in their own way will not prevent girls from enjoying a successful career in the future; indeed, the ability to nurture is as valuable a skill in the workplace as the ability to lead.”
—Anne Roiphe (20th century)
“In time your relatives will come to accept the idea that a career is as important to you as your family. Of course, in time the polar ice cap will melt.”
—Barbara Dale (b. 1940)