America’s First Black Physician (2021) | Hacker News Reader

America’s First Black Physician (2021)

smithsonianmag.com

56 pointsEdmond13 comments

Truly inspiring! The author Bryan Greene has done a great job of writing this article in a gripping narrative. I am curious whether there are any courses where I can learn this writing style. My writing is academic and quite dry, which I hate.

Just use "my boring writing in the style of Greene" as a prompt to GPT-3.

Interesting how most top level comments to this are using it as a jumping off point for various axes they have to grind ranging from the theoretical to the personal. But honestly it's to be expected in a positive article that didn't really leave room open to say anything negative about the subject.

I find it incredibly sad that he died at such a young age after his life's work was literally burned to the ground in a riot and before news could reach him of emancipation. For all of his accomplishments its really tragic that he did not live to see more of his work bear some fruit.

All I’ll add is that Smith was more “America’s first formally-credentialed Black physician,” since most physicians (in America, at least) didn’t attend medical school at the time; instead, medical schools were seen as an advanced education for tenured medical professionals, which made Smith’s accomplishments all the most striking, I think.

Douglass’ publishing partner Martin Delany, for example, was practicing as a physician in Boston in or around 1830 (IIRC), after having apprenticed under physicians. He would later enroll as one of the first Black doctors at Harvard Medical School, but racism amongst students and professors meant all Black students were expelled before he could graduate, which led to his career as a firebrand abolitionist.

> The moment he stepped back on U.S. soil, he delivered a lecture titled “The Fallacy of Phrenology,” where he attacked the notion that head shape and size dictates the relative intelligence of different racial groups.

But what if phrenology was based on machine learning?

https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04135v1

> Also, we find some discriminating structural features for predicting criminality, such as lip curvature, eye inner corner distance, and the so-called nose-mouth angle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com