The untold story of the courageous doctors and nurses who fought the battle for racial justice in hospitals, in clinics, and on the streets in the 1960s.

The Medical Committee for Human Rights was organized in the summer of 1964 by medical professionals, mostly northern whites, to provide support and care for activists organizing black voters in Mississippi. These doctors and nurses left their lives and private practices behind to march alongside and tend the wounds of demonstrators from the Freedom Summer, the March on Selma, the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and other landmark episodes in the history of the movement.

MCHR doctors soon realized that fighting segregation would mean not just caring for white activists but exposing and correcting shocking inequality in segregated medicine. These good doctors and nurses pioneered community health plans and brought medical care to the underserved and disenfranchised. Galvanized, and sometimes radicalized, by the glaring inequality they saw, the MCHR eventually expanded to tackling issues ranging from poverty to the war in Vietnam.

In The Good Doctors, award-winning historian John Dittmer gives an insightful and inspiring account of a group of idealists who put careers on the line for their belief that "health care is a human right."

John Dittmer received the Bancroft Prize and several other awards for his Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. He is a professor of history at DePauw University and resides in Fillmore, Indiana

Advance Praise for The Good Doctors:

"Those who think themselves familiar with the civil rights movement in the United States are in for a welcome surprise. The Good Doctors by prize-winning historian John Dittmer tells the heroic, and previously overlooked, story of an organization that stood at the barricades in every civil rights struggle from Selma to Chicago to Wounded Knee, battling inequality and racism in the medical profession while setting up clinics that today reach hundreds of thousands of underserved patients. The Good Doctors should be required reading for every American who views quality health care as a basic human right.”—David Oshinsky, author of Polio: An American Story, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in History

"Occasionally, but all too seldom, a book captures perfectly a neglected but extremely important subject. The Good Doctors is cause for celebration. It revives a little known chapter of the Civil Rights Movement by telling the story of a group of courageous Northern physicians who risked their lives and their careers to provide medical care for the casualties among the civil rights protesters in the South as they fought to end segregation and claim their rights as citizens. Those same doctors also fought valiantly to end segregation in the medical facilities of the South and to provide medical care to poor people who had been neglected shamefully by the medical profession. Deeply researched, brilliantly conceived, beautifully written and unsparing in its analysis of every character who walks across its pages, The Good Doctors is a triumph of passionate scholarship and balanced judgment."—James H. Jones, author of Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

"In this era of racial healing, The Good Doctors is a shocking reminder of how recently Jim Crow reigned over medical care in America. Well into the 1960s, many hospitals and doctors' offices remained segregated, with blacks given separate and grossly unequal access to beds, waiting rooms, and other basic services. Dittmer tells the tale of the courageous few in the medical profession who fought racial injustice and went on to many other battles in the 1960s and early 1970s. Freedom Summer, Selma, the anti-war movement, Alcatraz, Wounded Knee; they're all here, in this tour of a turbulent and inspiring time that speaks forcefully to our own.""—Tony Horwitz, author of A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World and Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

Reviews for The Good Doctors:

Read a feature column by Bill Minor of the desototimestribune.com in Mississippi (syndicated throughout the state.)

John Dittmer is a native Hoosier, born in Seymour, got his doctorate in history from Indiana University, taught for the last years of his career at DePauw University. But the middle years -- call it the formative period of his career -- were spent in Mississippi. This was the time of the civil rights struggle, and the Dittmer family bore witness from a post at Tougaloo College. The book he produced from that experience, "Local People," won the prestigious Bancroft Prize for distinguished historical scholarship.

Dittmer's most recent book, "The Good Doctors," is the story of a group of health-care professionals active in the Deep South at the height of the civil rights movement. Social justice in health care is the main story, but going forward, Dittmer chronicles the two most recent efforts, and failures, to achieve national health reform in the United States."—IndiyStar.com. Read full review,

“Dittmer uses interviews plus other primary and secondary sources to shed light on an organization that has remained largely unchronicled. Clearly presented and absorbing”—Library Journal

“Civil-rights historian Dittmer focuses on one of the lesser-known groups involved in the struggle… Dittmer reveals the motivations of many of the organization’s leaders, and he paints a disturbing picture of the shameful treatment of both black doctors and patients in the South. In the early chapters he writes vividly of the challenges facing civil-rights workers and of the brutality—beatings, jailings, killings—inflicted on them… A stark reminder not just of the actions of a group of idealistic activists but of the violence and turmoil of the nation’s not-so-distant past.”—Kirkus Reviews

Review from the Jackson Free Press

Praise for Local People:

"At once the movement's history in microcosm and a powerful story in its own right."—Washington Post