National Medical Association

I'm originally from Houston, Texas.

I work now at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and I serve as the 127th president of the National Medical Association.

Of Houston? No, so NMA, we

represent doctors across the country.

Houston Metaphorm is celebrating 100 years right now.

Yes.

NMA, they are a component society of the National Medical Association.

And so I'm honored to be here as part of their centennial celebration representing the national organization.

You know, I feel like the diseases are sort of, are already eradicated and I'm just like, "Why, why would I just keep pumping my kids with these?"

The National Medical Association says vaccination remains one of the safest and most effective tools to protect children and communities.

But so far this year, more than 4,000 measles cases have been confirmed across the country, the highest number in three decades.

At least two measles-related deaths have been reported in Pennsylvania.

So Beth Israel Deaconess was the first hospital system to throw it out.

And I remember my friend and I went to the National Medical Association and Kamara Jones talked about this to a prominent health equity advocate researcher at Morehouse.

And I remember walking up to camera.

I'm like, I'm a nephrologist and I'm going to change.

We make up maybe 4% of the physician population.

He was a frequent attendee at the National Medical Association, the National Society of Black Physicians, and he would go every year.

We would go every year as a family, and our parents would put my brother and me in a, the children's program, and I think that was an example of one meeting per year where he could, if you will, let his hair down and be with his peers and maybe talk about the struggles because the m- majority of the meetings and groups he would live were probably didn't appreciate that struggle.

But that was always the meeting in August that he would look forward to, and we would look forward to going, attending with him as a family.

We had Dr.

Price from the, uh, National Medical Association talk about the Cobb Scholar Program.

And then we had a, a doctor from UIC talk about...

Oh my God, I forget what the topic.

And in the directory, there was our man, A.W.K. Newton.

It listed him as a graduate of New York Medical College, a member of the National Medical Association, former house surgeon at the New York Hospital on Blackwell's Island, now known as Roosevelt Island, and a former surgeon for the Union Army during the Civil War.

It also said that he had done some coursework at Yale and written articles about facial neuralgia and cerebral spinal meningitis.

But when Smith & Co. had gone looking for records, they could find nothing to match any of that.