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:
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)
“The 19-year-old Diana ... decided to make her career that of wife. Today that can be a very, very iffy line of work.... And what sometimes happens to the women who pursue it is the best argument imaginable for teaching girls that they should always be able to take care of themselves.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“I began my editorial career with the presidency of Mr. Adams, and my principal object was to render his administration all the assistance in my power. I flattered myself with the hope of accompanying him through [his] voyage, and of partaking in a trifling degree, of the glory of the enterprise; but he suddenly tacked about, and I could follow him no longer. I therefore waited for the first opportunity to haul down my sails.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)