David Barton Smith

David is an Emeritus Professor at Temple University and a member of the Department of Health Management and Policy at Drexel University. He has authored eight books, more than fifty journal articles and was the recipient of a RWJ Health Policy Research Investigator Award for the study of the racial desegregation of America’s hospitals. His last book, The Power to Heal: Civil Rights, Medicare, and the Struggle to Transform America’s Health System, received the Goldberg Prize for the year’s best book in medicine. He assisted in the development of the related prize-winning documentary supported by the National Endowment for Humanities and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, narrated by Danny Glover, and aired on many PBS stations. Since its release he has toured giving presentations related to the book and documentary to university, professional associations, civil rights, and community audiences. His work has been cited by The Washington Post, NPR and The New York Times as part of their 1619 Project. “The Pandemic Challenge: End Separate and Unequal Care” appeared in the July 2020 issue of the American Journal of Medical Sciences.

His most recent work, Malicious Intent: Murder and the Perpetuation of Jim Crow Healthcare will be released by Vanderbilt University Press in October 2023. (It explores the suspicious death of a physician whistle blower in a hospital whose medical staff tried to block its desegregation during the implementation of the Medicare program. It illustrates, in a vivid, easily understandable way, the sorting of patients that accounts for most of the racial and economic differences in access and outcomes to health care that persist. (The death is also now an open case being investigated by the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation as authorized by the Emmit Till Cold Case Investigation Act).