Searching for Dr. Harris

This is the untold story of Dr. J. D. Harris, an African American physician whose life and career straddled enormous changes for Black professionals and the practice of medicine. Born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Harris served as a contract physician to the Union Army and transitioned to a similar post under the Freedmen's Bureau, treating Black troops and freemen in Virginia. Margaret Humphreys narrates not only what we know about Harris, but offers context to his remarkable journey, including how incredible it was that a young man born into freedom in a slave state learned to read when literacy for Black people was illegal. He was one of very few African Americans to become a doctor before Howard Medical School opened in the 1870s, a fact that reveals both the structural barriers to medical education for Black Americans and highlights how those structures weakened in the 1860s.

Drawing on census records, court records, Civil War and Reconstruction documents from the National Archives, African American newspapers, and more, this book is a revealing look at not only the history of medicine in the Southern United States, but of race and citizenship during one of the nation's most tumultuous eras.