Dr. Vanessa Northington Gamble (1953-)

Dr. Vanessa Northington Gamble was born in West Philadelphia in 1953. Dr. Gamble and her sister were raised by her mother and grandmother in a poor neighborhood in West Philadelphia. Gamble overcame the hardships of poverty and excelled in school. She was granted financial assistance from the White-Williams Scholars organization, a non-profit group that pays for the education of children from low-income families, to attend the Philadelphia High School for Girls. Upon graduating summa cum laude in 1970, she went to Hampshire College to study medical sociology and human biology, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1974. While in college she became interested in the Tuskegee syphilis study which prompted her to write her senior thesis on this medical experiment.

Gamble was is no way done with her education at this point. She earned a doctor of medicine degree in 1983 from the University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D. in the history and sociology of science. Her residency in family medicine was then completed at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.

Dr. Gamble is known for her social activism and her mission to provide equal access to quality medical care for all Americans. Her professional career includes teaching at the Harvard School of Public Health, the University of Massachusetts, and Hampshire College, where she was appointed to the Board of Trustees. Due to her focus on race and medicine, in 1989 while at the University of Wisconsin she developed one of the first courses in the country to explore the history of race and American medicine and public health. She was appointed associate professor of history of medicine and family medicine, and founder and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at the University of Wisconsin Medical School.

Dr. Gamble chaired the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Legacy Committee in 1997 and in 2004 was named director of Tuskegee’s Bioethics Center. Gamble agreed to the position of director, not only for the challenge, but because it is the only national bioethics center in the country dedicated to issues involved African-Americans and other underrepresented groups. Before being named director of the center, in 2003 she was appointed associate professor in the department of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she was deputy director of the Center for Health Disparities Solutions.

In addition to these honors, in 1999 Dr. Gamble was appointed head of the Association of American Medical Colleges’ (AAMC) Division of Community and Minority Programs.  Dr. Gamble has served as a consultant or committee member in a plethora of projects such as the Institute of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the American Foundation for AIDS Research. Dr. Gamble has published extensively in the field of medical history including “Making a Place for Ourselves: The Black Hospital Movement, 1920-1945.”

Dr. Gamble has and will continue to contribute greatly to providing representation and equal access to health care for vulnerable populations. Her activism and intellect has provided a great service to the medical field and the American public.