…black male to head the Department of Health & Human Services.
1978 – Dr. LaSalle D. Leffall becomes the first black President of the American Cancer Society.
1987 – Dr. Ben Carson, neurosurgeon, leads a seventy-member surgical team at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD in the separation of Siamese twins joined at the cranium.
1990 – Dr. Marilyn Hughes Gaston becomes the first female and first African American to direct a public health service bureau: the Bureau of Primary Health Care in the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Her 1986 study of sickle-cell disease led to a nationwide screening program to test newborns for immediate treatment.
1991 – Dr. Vivian Pinn is the first female and first African-American woman to be appointed Director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health for the National Institutes of Health, which oversees research on women and insures that they are represented in broad clinical trials.
1992 – Dr. Mae C. Jemison, the first African American female astronaut in NASA history, becomes the first black woman in space, as part of SPACELAB J, a successful joint U.S. and Japanese science mission. A graduate of Cornell University Medical School, Jemison served in the Peace Corps as its area medical officer, from 1983 to 1985, in the West African countries of Sierra Leone and Liberia.
1993 – Dr. Edward S. Cooper is the first African American elected as National President of the American Heart Association.
Dr. Joycelyn Elders is the first African American to be appointed as U.S. Surgeon General.
Dr. Barbara Ross-Lee is the first African-American woman to be appointed dean of a U.S. medical school (Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine).
1994 – Reginald Ware publishes Heart & Soul magazine, which is the nation’s first healthy lifestyle magazine for African Americans.
1995 – Dr. Helene Doris Gayle is the first female and first African-American Director of the National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
1996 – Dr. Ernest E. Just is recognized for his contributions to the biological sciences with a commemorative U.S. Postal Service stamp.
1997 – Dr. Donna Christian-Christensen is the first female and first African-American female physician in the U.S. Congress.
Drs. Paula Mahone and Karen Drake are members of a team of forty specialists involved in the delivery of the McCaughey septuplets at Iowa Methodist Medical Center.
1998 – Dr. David Satcher is sworn in as both the Assistant Secretary for Health and U.S. Surgeon General.
2000 – Dr. Sharon Henry is the first African-American woman to be elected into membership as a fellow in the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma.
The nation’s largest group of African-American physicians, the National Medical Association (NMA), charge that many managed care plans effectively discriminate against them
2002 – Dr. Roselyn Payne Epps is the first African-American woman to serve as President of the American Medical Women’s Association.
2005 – Reginald Ware creates BlackDoctor.org as the nation’s first health website dedicated to the culturally specific health and wellness needs of African Americans.
2010 – President Barack Obama signs the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare or the federal health care law, into law. Together with the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, it represents the most significant regulatory overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.