physician; educator; administrator
Personal Information
Born March 2, 1941 in Anniston, AL; son of Wilmer (a foundry worker) and Anna Satcher; married to Nola Richardson (a poet); children: Gretchen, David, Daraka, Daryl.
Education: Morehouse College, B.S. (with honors), 1963; Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, M.D.-Ph.D., 1970.
Memberships: Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, Alpha Omega Alpha.
Career
King-Drew Sickle Cell Center, Los Angeles, CA, director, 1971-79; Second Baptist Free Clinic, Los Angeles, medical director, 1974-79; Charles R. Drew Postgraduate Medical School, Los Angeles, interim dean, c. 1975; Morehouse College School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA, chairman of Department of Community Medicine and Family Practice, 1979-82; Meharry Medical College, Nashville, TN, college president and chief executive officer of Hubbard Hospital, both 1982-93; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Atlanta, director, 1994--.
Life's Work
On January 1, 1994, Dr. David Satcher assumed the directorship of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a federal agency endowed with the task of tracking and preventing the spread of illnesses as varied as whooping cough, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), and heart disease. Satcher has become the first African American head of the Atlanta-based agency and will preside over its $2 billion- plus budget and its 7,000 employees.
USA Today has called Satcher "one of the nation's most influential physicians," citing not only his mission at the CDC but also his years spent as president of Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. Satcher, who has long prioritized prevention and education as essential components in disease control, will bring that philosophy to bear upon his work at the CDC.
According to Peter Applebome in the New York Times, what makes Satcher a physician of note "is less what he says than what he has done. In a nation where it's almost impossible to flip across a radio dial without hearing the standard talk show litany of what government and society can't do, his life has been an exercise in walking up to locked doors and somehow finding a key." Donna Shalala, the secretary of Health and Human Services, told the Los Angeles Times that Satcher is "one of the great catches of [President Bill] Clinton's administration." She added: "We consider CDC one of the jewels in our crown, and he's the right person at the right time. We were very anxious to get him. He's got first-class credentials. He is a physician and a leader in health, and he has particular concerns about prevention and minority health, which is of great concern to this department."
Satcher's desire to become a doctor may have been planted in his earliest years, when he himself almost succumbed to a deadly disease. At the tender age of two, he contracted whooping cough--an illness for which immunizations exist today--and he nearly died. Satcher told the Los Angeles Times that he can remember the painful and desperate struggle to draw each breath, and the valiant efforts his mother and a black physician went to in order to preserve his life. At one point he was given just a week to live, but he managed to survive. As he grew up, his mother often reminisced about the ordeal, and he began to dream of becoming a doctor. As Marlene Cimons put it in the Los Angeles Times, this unforgettable childhood experience "inspired Satcher's decision, at age 8, to make medicine his calling. Like the doctor who helped save him, Satcher would help others without adequate medical care. Moreover, his near-death from a disease that today is preventable by immunization only heightened that commitment."
Satcher's background might have seemed an unlikely one to produce a prominent national physician. He was born and raised in Anniston, Alabama, one of ten children of self-taught farmers who did not attend school beyond the elementary level. "I may have come from a poor family economically, but they were not poor in spirit," Satcher told the Los Angeles Times. "We had a rich environment from the spirit of my parents, both of whom had a vision for their children. They didn't keep us out of school working in the fields. They made it clear that school came first, and that teachers were heroes." Satcher's parents were also deeply religious. His father perfected his reading by studying scripture and encouraged Satcher to develop leadership techniques through church programs.
Satcher recalled in USA Today that he began talking about becoming a doctor when he was in the third grade. "I grew up saying I was going to go back to Anniston and be a family physician," he said. "And that was during the time when no one in Anniston was going to college, much less anyone black." In 1959 Satcher's persistence was rewarded. He received a full scholarship to Morehouse College in Atlanta, and he moved there to study biology. Supporting himself with odd jobs and earning honors grades, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1963. The idea of returning to Anniston began to dim when he was accepted at the prestigious Case Western Reserve School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio.
At Case Western, Satcher studied cytogenetics--a discipline having to do with inherited irregularities in cells--earning a Ph.D. in the field in 1970. Simultaneously, he acquired his general medical degree. After completing his residency at the University of Rochester, he moved to Los Angeles, California, and began to use his education in practical ways. He took a position as director of the King-Drew Sickle Cell Center, a research laboratory devoted to finding a cure for sickle cell anemia.
At the same time, Satcher taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, served as an interim dean at the Charles R. Drew Postgraduate Medical School, and helped to open and direct a free clinic at the Second Baptist Church in Watts, a poor section of Los Angeles. Longtime Satcher friend Ben Haimowitz told the Washington Post that the gifted doctor "could have gone anywhere he wanted in academic medicine.... He could have picked where he wanted to go, and where he wanted to go was Watts." Satcher himself put it more succinctly in USA Today: "I discovered that there were a lot of Anniston, Alabamas in this country and that I had the ability to help them."
In 1979 Satcher moved to Atlanta, Georgia, to become the chairman of the Morehouse College School of Medicine's Department of Community Medicine and Family Practice. There he was able to fulfill his dream of preparing young men and women to practice medicine in poor and urban areas where qualified physicians were often in short supply. Morehouse was the newest of three historically black four-year medical colleges in the United States. Another older institution was Meharry Medical College in Nashville. By the early 1980s, Meharry had fallen upon hard times. The school was in danger of losing its accreditation: massive debts had accumulated and the ratio of students to teachers was too high. In 1982, Meharry's board of trustees appointed Satcher president of the college and chief executive officer of the associated Hubbard Hospital. Satcher moved to Nashville and began the process of addressing Meharry's many dilemmas.
A 1986 Ebony magazine profile of Meharry Medical College revealed that the institution had undergone a dramatic turnaround in its fortunes after Satcher's arrival. Both the medical school and Hubbard Hospital had balanced their budgets, and a capital campaign had raised more than $25 million in gifts and pledges. More than 40 new faculty members had been hired, and as many as 94 percent of the students who enrolled were graduating after passing national examinations for health professionals. "Meharry today is on a sounder footing than possibly at any other time in its long history," wrote Ebony contributor Thad Martin. "Much of the credit for the school's turnaround, faculty and administration agree, has to go to Dr. Satcher."
Satcher himself preferred to consider Meharry's success a team effort, rather than a single-handed coup on his part. He was nevertheless proud of the institution's improving outlook, as well as its dedication to educating young, committed black health professionals. "At any level, most black students score lower on all standardized tests," Satcher told the Los Angeles Times. "Meharry tried to work with that knowledge. We took students no other medical schools would take, students that others had given up on. We said: No student will be allowed to graduate without passing both parts of the national boards.... That meant we had to get them ready.... Meharry took them, believing there was nothing more important we could do than develop people. Many of those students are now full professors at those medical schools where they were turned down."
One problem remained at Meharry: finding a large enough hospital system to serve as a hands-on educational tool for the students. In a controversial move in 1988, Satcher proposed the merger of Hubbard Hospital with the larger but struggling Nashville General Hospital. The merger would mean that Nashville General--a hospital serving mostly white patients--would become a principal teaching center for Meharry's black students. According to Marlene Cimons, the proposal was controversial "because black doctors would be caring for mostly white patients. But the plan--which Satcher says evoked a 'community debate that spanned several years and resulted in a coalition of support which cut across all racial, ethnic and economic levels'--worked, saving both the hospital and the school." The merger was in process when Satcher was approached about the job at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Satcher was a primary candidate for the post at the CDC because of his long-standing commitment to preventive health care, as well as his demonstrated knowledge of urban and poverty-related public health problems. He was chosen by Health and Human Services secretary Donna Shalala in the summer of 1993 to head the CDC--an organization troubled with proposed budget cuts and charges of improprieties and discrimination in hiring and promotions. Satcher began to work with the agency in the autumn of 1993. Officially he took over as director on January 1, 1994, and by that time his agenda was a matter of public record.
What he planned to emphasize, Satcher told the press, would be community outreach programs on healthy lifestyles. He said he hoped to enlist the aid of public schools and churches in order to spread positive messages about diet, exercise, and avoidance of drugs and alcohol among the younger generation of Americans especially. "As early as you can get to people in terms of diet, exercise and avoidance of toxics, you do it," he told the New York Times. "We're going to try to find every successful program we can in this country."
Satcher has spoken openly about the need to provide condoms and information about their use to sexually active people in order to decrease their risk of infection with AIDS. He told the New York Times that he is comfortable with the idea of condom distribution in schools. "My attitude is that we really have to provide people in this country with the information they need to protect themselves from this virus," he said. "And we can't let political, cultural or religious differences interfere with that." Satcher also plans to continue the CDC's growing role in addressing violence as a public health issue. The physician told the New York Times: "If you look at the major cause of death today, it's not smallpox or polio or even infectious diseases. Violence is the leading cause of lost life in this country today. If it's not a public health problem, why are all those people dying from it?" Satcher emphasized, however, that in becoming involved in the fight against violence, the CDC will not neglect its traditional role of identifying and seeking to curb infectious diseases, researching cures for a variety of ailments, and urging immunizations not only for children but for adults as well.
As a prominent member of the Clinton administration, Satcher has been active in the arena of health care reform. He has served as an adviser to America's first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as a member of her task force on health care reform, and he is encouraged by the administration's emphasis upon prevention as the most effective cure for disease. Satcher concluded in the New York Times: "I think what we're talking about doing in this country is providing incentives for health care providers, physicians and others to work to keep people healthy, whereas today most of the incentives are toward treating people when they're sick or in bringing to bear the greatest levels of technology we can."
Satcher, who is married to poet Nola Richardson and the father of four grown children, stays healthy himself by eating a low- fat diet and jogging five days each week. Asked by Ebony magazine how he planned to run the CDC, the new director said: "I have no illusions of grandeur of what I as an individual can do without the help of other people. So I don't have any problems with high expectations as long as people say we're going to work together. I'm a team player. I function best when I can get the team going. That's how I view leadership."
Awards
American Black Achievement Award, business and professions category, 1994.
Further Reading
Sources
- Atlanta Constitution, August 21, 1993, p. A-4.
- Ebony, March 1986, p. 44-50; January 1994, p. 80-82.
- Los Angeles Times, March 1, 1994, p. E-1.
- New York Times, September 12, 1993, p. A-8; September 26, 1993, p. E-7.
- USA Today, December 7, 1993, p. D-8.
- Washington Post, August 24, 1993, p. Health-6.
— Anne Janette Johnson
