Leonidas H. Berry

In February 1970, Leonidas H. Berry chartered two airplanes at his own expense and filled them with doctors, nurses and technicians. The group flew to Cairo, Illinois, a town whose Black residents were largely cut off from local medical care, and set up clinics on the ground. Berry called the volunteers the Flying Black Medics.

Berry knew exclusion within medicine firsthand. Born in North Carolina in 1902, he graduated from Wilberforce University, studied at the University of Chicago and earned his medical degree at Rush in 1929. In the 1930s he studied under Rudolph Schindler, the physician who had developed the first practical gastroscope, the lighted instrument that lets a doctor see inside the stomach. In 1931, he became the first Black intern at Chicago's Cook County Hospital. In 1946, he became the first African American attending staff physician at the hospital in half a century, an appointment that reached back to Daniel Hale Williams, who had served there in the 1890s.

The same year, he joined Chicago's Michael Reese Hospital as the first Black physician on its staff, then spent the next seventeen years fighting to move from a limited courtesy appointment to the attending staff. He led gastroenterology at Provident Hospital for thirty-five years, beginning in 1935, serving a hospital founded to give Black physicians and patients a place that mainstream medicine denied them. The American Gastroenterological Association describes him as the first Black gastroenterologist.

Berry became known for his work in gastroscopy, the examination of the stomach with lighted instruments. In 1955, he developed the Eder-Berry gastrobiopsy scope, an instrument that allowed direct-vision biopsy of stomach tissue, and the Museum of Health Care's account describes him as one of the leading gastroenterologists of his time.

His standing in the profession grew into organizing. He served as National Medical Association president in 1965 and 1966, leading the country's principal organization of Black physicians. In 1958, he had objected to a medical society holding its annual meeting in New Orleans, where segregation would prevent him from attending on equal terms, and asked the organization to take a stand.

The Flying Black Medics flight to Cairo carried his work beyond hospital walls one last time. The Smithsonian's medical collection holds a gastroscope he owned and used, a small instrument with a large career attached to it.