Minorities in medical school and National Medical Fellowships, Inc.: 50 years and counting.

For more than 50 years, National Medical Fellowships, Inc. (NMF) has been the only private national organization dedicated exclusively to increasing the numbers of minorities in medicine. In the 1920s, Franklin C. McLean, an eminent physician in Chicago, began working to include Negro physicians in high-ranked hospital residencies. In 1946 he and his colleagues founded Provident Medical Associates (PMA), which would later become National Medical Fellowships, Inc. During the late 1940s and 1950s, the challenge was to break down the barriers that prevented Negro physicians from training. In the 1950s, the NMF made steady progress in increasing the number of black physicians, but it was in the 1960s that the barriers to blacks in medical training began to fall and their numbers increased dramatically. In the 1970s the NMF expanded its focus to include all minorities underrepresented in medicine, and through its programs and the broad social changes in U.S. society, unprecedented proportions of blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans entered medical training. In the 1980s the commitment to bring minority physicians into medicine deepened and broadened, yet in the late 1990s the progress of past decades is jeopardized by legal and administrative restrictions. Now, when the numbers of underrepresented minorities are declining, the need to maintain and expand programs such as those of the NMF is more urgent than ever.