On a cold December night 75 years ago, an ambulance arrived at the Duke Hospital emergency room bearing a 24-year-old Army veteran named Maltheus Avery, who had suffered severe brain injuries in a car wreck near Mebane. Doctors examined him and determined he was too badly injured to be a candidate for surgery. Avery was Black, and because there were no beds available in the Black ward at Duke, the doctors had him taken to Lincoln Hospital, Durham’s Black hospital. He died there within minutes of arrival.
The incident drew widespread attention, prompting a spate of news articles, op-eds, and letters critical of Duke for turning away a dying man no matter what his race. But Avery’s story was eventually overtaken in the news by other events and, for most intents and purposes, all but forgotten.
Jeffrey Baker, MD, a professor of pediatrics, medical historian, and director of the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine, and Damon Tweedy, MD, a professor of psychiatry and author of the bestselling book “Black Man in a White Coat,” want to change that. They have brought Avery’s story back into the light with “Unhealed,” a new seven-episode podcast.
“Unhealed,” produced by Beverly Abel, takes a deep dive into the context, circumstances, and consequences of Avery’s story and explores why it matters today.
“We want everyone at Duke to know this story and remember his name: Maltheus Avery,” said Baker, who joined Tweedy and Abel in a discussion about the podcast in front of an audience of faculty, students, and staff at the Trent Semans Center for Health Education on February 11. “His story is part of Duke’s story, and it deserves to be remembered. We need to know how to tell our own story, and we need to do it without turning history into a caricature.”
Lessons to Be Learned
Tweedy first came across Avery’s story in “One Blood,” a 1996 book by the late historian Cornelia Spencer “Spencie” Love about the much better-known case of Charles Drew, MD, a Black surgeon and pioneering researcher in blood transfusion and blood banking. Drew died in April 1950 in remarkably similar circumstances to Avery’s, from injuries he sustained in a car crash not far from where Avery had his.
Rumors circulated that Drew had been refused treatment at a white hospital. What really happened is that surgeons did try to save him at segregated Alamance General Hospital, but his injuries proved fatal.
However, as Love described in her book, eight months later Maltheus Avery was denied admission at Duke, even though there were beds available on the white ward. Love came to realize that with the passage of time, the two stories became remembered as one.
In the segregated Jim Crow South, Tweedy and Baker explained, such stories were not unusual. While Duke admitted patients of both races, only about one-sixth of its hospital beds were reserved for Black patients — about half of what was needed to care for the local African-American population. As a result, Black patients often had to be transferred to Lincoln Hospital when only white beds were available at Duke. While Lincoln had excellent doctors and nurses, it was less well equipped than Duke.
Much has changed since 1950. But Tweedy said there is still much to be learned from Avery’s story.
“It’s easy to look back at 1950 and say, ‘We’re better than that now,’ and look down on those who came before us,” Tweedy said. “But this story reminds us to look at ourselves today and ask, ‘How will people look back on us 75 years from now? What are we doing now that might one day be judged harshly?’ It’s also important for us to understand that this is not only a story about a bad thing that happened. It’s also a story about how people resisted and pushed back. In the 1940s, ‘50s, ‘60s, things for a lot of people were much worse than now. Asking yourself, ‘How did they get through those trials and make things better?’ might help teach us something about perseverance and resilience today.”
A Family Story
Of course, Avery’s family never forgot what had happened to him. His death shattered his parents, Hazel and Napoleon; sister, Evelyn; brothers, Parnell and Waddell; and his wife, Nannie, who gave birth to a daughter just one week after Avery died. They were forever changed by it. The incident turned both Parnell and Waddell toward careers in health care: Parnell became a renowned physician and Waddell a hospital administrator. Both consciously worked to change the system they felt had failed their brother.
Surviving family members told Baker and Tweedy that the family remained deeply embittered by Duke’s actions on the night Avery died, and by the lack of acknowledgement afterward.
Baker and Tweedy reached out to Maltheus Avery’s daughter, Malthaus Avery Blake McDowell. Over a long series of emotional discussions, she agreed to share her experiences and perspectives for the podcast, and she came to Durham to see the sites where her father had been initially examined and where he had died.
The podcast team also worked with Duke leadership to find an appropriate way to recognize Maltheus Avery. Mary E. Klotman, MD, executive vice president for health affairs and dean of Duke University School of Medicine, said Duke Health will develop an ongoing lectureship series in his honor.
“The family wanted an acknowledgement,” Baker said. “They wanted his story to be remembered. We spent months talking to one group after another, until one day I was in a meeting with Dean Klotman, and she said, ‘We just need to get the right people in the room.’ And she made it happen.”
The podcast team gave McDowell, Avery’s daughter, the last word in the final episode. She said she agreed to participate on behalf of every member of her father’s family. Trauma is generational, she said, and every family has stories that need to be told.
“There are a lot of layers to this story,” Tweedy said. “On one hand, it’s a story of tremendous victimization. But on the other, it’s a story of the American Dream for many Black people of Avery’s time, of believing you can get ahead even in the face of great adversity, of people pushing back against injustice every step of the way.”
“After we finally finished the podcast, we sent it to the family. I was at an airport when I got an email from them. It said, ‘He (Maltheus) can finally rest.’”