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MOREHOUSE SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

Bush urges aid for Morehouse

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DR. LUCIUS W. SULLIVAN

By SIMON ANEKWE
Amsterdam News Staff

Barbara Bush, wife of the U.S. Vice President, Thursday urged individual and corporate contributions to the $15 million first national campaign of Atlanta's Morehouse School of Medicine, during a luncheon at the Equitable Life Assurance Society headquarters chaired by Robert F. Froehlke, chairman of Equitable.

Opened in 1978, Morehouse is the third predominantly Black medical school after Howard and Meharry both over 100 years old. The goal of the campaign is to provide a $5 million endowment for student financial aid and funds for expansion and faculty development Morehouse President and Dean, Dr. Louis W. Sillivan told the Amsterdam News earlier.

Explaining why she agreed to serve on the school's trustee board, Mrs. Bush, at whose Washington, D.C. home the campaign was launched last November, said there is a "tremendous need for Black doctors."

Blacks form 12 percent of the U.S. population but only three percent of doctors, she continued. The life expectancy of Blacks is five to six years lower than that of whites, while the death rate of Blacks is twice as much.

Though there is a projected surplus of physicians and surgeons by 1990 for the country as a whole, there would at the same time be a deficit of Black doctors, Mrs. Bush stated. And the health status of Blacks is directly linked to the number of physicians and surgeons serving them.

"Black colleges make a real difference in our relations with the Third World," the Vice President's wife added, naming Tuskegee Institute, Meharry and Howard as institutions that have contributed most to that positive difference.

"But the strongest reason" why her listeners should contribute to the campaign "is Sullivan's leadership," Mrs. Bush ended, beckoning him to the podium.

The day before the luncheon Sullivan had been to the Amsterdam News to get his appeal to the Black community; and when it was over he returned uptown to a conference with the Harlem Hospital Center medical board and top staff.

Morehouse School of Medicine came into being for the reasons Mrs. Bush gave, he told the guests. It grew from an idea in Atlanta's Black community  crystallized by the area's Black doctors. The Atlanta University Center, of which the school is the seventh consortium member, took the idea which was implemented by Morehouse College, now separated from the medical school.

Since then the Charles Drew Medical School has been started at the University of California in Los Angeles. Morehouse began as a two-year institution and its first three classes transferred to older institutions to complete their education.

Morehouse received a charter as a full four-year medical school in 1981. Its program had been accredited from the beginning by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the official accreditation agency for U.S. medical schools. 

From the start, its performance has been high. At the end of its second year, the studendts competed in a national examination and achieved a 93% passing rate and such a level has been maintained, Dr. Sullivan stated.

The first four-year class will be graduated in 1985. "The greatest need is money to assist in expansion," Sullivan states. "We depend on the public for support."

The student body is national; 15 percent white, 5 percent "other" and 80 percent Black. Some 31 percent come from outside the Atlanta area, including New Yorkers. 

One of them, Miriam Burnett of Queens, praised the institution in a luncheon speech. Present also was Dr. Jennifer Greene, a resident at Harlem Hospital who did her first two years at Morehouse.

At the Amsterdam News, Dr. Sullivan had also noted that there were three producing Black medical schools out of 127 in the nation. Of a total of 17,000 students between 700 and 800 were Black, with Howard and Meharry graduating about 250 doctors a year.