It’s December in my Southern California town, and the mornings are always cold. If I can convince my father to turn on the barely functional heater before bedtime, he will turn it off by four in the morning to save money. I do not blame him. Neither he nor my mother has a stable job — and not only because of the widespread job losses caused by the coronavirus pandemic. In spite of being two of the hardest-working people I know, they have lived at the economic edge — and sometimes slipped over it — my entire life.

According to the American Medical Association, of the roughly 5.2 million American Indians and Alaska Natives in the United States, approximately 3,400 are physicians. Put another way, Native Americans, at 2 percent of the US population, make up just two-fifths of 1 percent of physicians working in America today. And there aren’t enough of us... Read more about Where are all the Native American medical students?

“Community service is always going to be central to what I do,” says second-year MD student Jalen Benson. “These incredible institutions like Harvard have a lot of low-income—and especially Black and brown—people in their shadows who don’t feel they can access state-of-the-art hospitals. A large part of the reason is historic and institutional barriers that are present today, so my goal is to minimize those barriers.”

A young Black man arrives in the emergency room, doubled over in pain from a sickle cell crisis. “It’s an act,” says the attending physician dismissively. “I think he just wants drugs.” The attending refuses to prescribe the opioids he might give to a white patient in similar straits. Andrea Reid, MD ’88, associate dean for student and multicultural affairs for the  Program in Medical Education and director of the Office of Recruitment and Multicultural Affairs at Harvard Medical School, witnessed too many such scenes as a trainee in Boston-area hospitals in the 1980s and ’90s.

After months of public health and political debates on vaccine prioritization for incarcerated populations, Covid-19 vaccination has begun in prisons and jails across the United States. Yet little is... Read more about ICE must provide Covid-19 vaccines to all detained migrants

MD students’ telehealth initiative provides pandemic support: The severe pain and lengthy hospital stay could have been avoided, said Angela, an undocumented immigrant from Colombia, if only the application she had submitted to receive Charity Care in New Jersey two months earlier had been approved, or if just one of the nearly 70 follow-up calls she made had been returned.

LaShyra Nolen has packed a lot into her first 15 months as a medical student. Elected president of her Harvard Medical School (HMS) Class of 2023, which by Harvard tradition also meant she presided over the Student Council as a first-year student, Nolen became the first Black woman on record to hold the position.

Early in my medical school career, before I became accustomed to the marble buildings and grandiose paintings of physicians on the walls, I attended the unveiling of a new portrait. Depicting William Hinton, a Black physician known for groundbreaking work in syphilis treatment, the addition garnered attention from faculty and students alike. We stood in the large room, surrounded by portraits of mostly White physicians, as Hinton’s image was revealed.

I exist in parallel universes. In one, I am a medical student and campus leader. In the other, I am a member of a systemically oppressive society and steward of my ancestors’ sacrifices. In both, I exist as a Black woman — and sometimes that identity makes these two universes clash.