About the author
L. Julian Haywood, MD, is Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of Southern California and has spent practically all of his professional medical career at L.A. County + USC Medical Center. He is the author of over 600 scientific publications.
The fifth of six children born to Thomas Woodly Haywood, M.D., and Louise Viola Hayley Haywood, Dr. Haywood completed his early education in the segregated schools of his hometown of Warrenton, NC, where his father practiced as the area's first African American physician (and the only one for decades) and his mother taught grade school. After graduating from John R. Hawkins High School in 1944, he entered the Army Specialized Training Reserve Program (ASTRP) at Howard University in Washington, DC, during World War II. The end of the war resulted in his discharge in 1945, after which he entered Hampton Institute, in Hampton, VA, where he earned a B.S. degree in biology, with high honors, in 1948. He then returned to Howard as a medical student in the College of Medicine's Class of 1952 and received his M.D. degree.
After completing an internship at St. Mary's Hospital (affiliated with the University of Rochester and Georgetown University schools of medicine) in Rochester, NY, he entered the residency program in psychiatry at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and was assigned to the affiliated Roanoke Veterans Affairs Hospital in Roanoke. After six months, however, he resigned this position when he was refused on-site housing on the basis of race. He was accepted into the residency program in internal medicine back at Howard, headed by Dr. John B. Johnson, under whom he had served a summer fellowship prior to receiving his M.D. degree. Drafted into the service during the Korean War, he entered the Navy in 1954 and served most of his time as a medical officer at the U.S. Naval Depot in Bayonne, NJ. He began a residency in internal medicine at the Los Angeles County General Hospital in September 1956, when this narrative begins.