To Raise Up the Man Farthest Down ― Tuskegee University's Advancements in Human Health 1881-1987

An important historical account of Tuskegee University’s significant advances in health care, which affected millions of lives worldwide.

Tuskegee University is most commonly associated with its founding president, Booker T. Washington, the scientific innovator George Washington Carver, or the renowned Tuskegee Airmen. Although the university’s accomplishments and devotion to social issues are well known, its work in medical research and health care has received little acknowledgment. Yet Tuskegee has been fulfilling Washington’s vision of “healthy minds and bodies” since its inception in 1881. In To Raise Up the Man Farthest Down, Dana R. Chandler and Edith Powell document Tuskegee University’s medical and public health history with rich archival data and never-before-published photographs.

Tuskegee University was on the forefront in providing local farmers the benefits of their agrarian research and helped create the massive Agricultural Extension System managed today by land grant universities throughout the United States. Tuskegee established the first baccalaureate nursing program in the state and was also home to Alabama’s first hospital for African Americans. Washington accepted the first licensed female physician in the state for the position of resident physician at Tuskegee. And, most notably, it Tuskegee was the site of a remarkable development in American biochemistry history: its microbiology laboratory was the only one relied upon by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) to produce the HeLa cell cultures employed in the national field trials for the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines. Chandler and Powell are also interested in correcting a long-held but false historical perception that Tuskegee University’s medical research legacy begins and ends with its involvement with the shameful and infamous “study” of untreated syphilis.

Meticulously researched, this book is filled with previously undocumented information taken directly from the vast Tuskegee University archives. Readers will gain a new appreciation for how Tuskegee’s people and institutions have influenced community health, food science, and national medical life throughout the twentieth century.

Dana R. Chandler is the university archivist and an assistant professor of history at Tuskegee University. He serves on the board of directors of the Epigraphic Society and won the 2016 Outstanding Faculty Performance Award at Tuskegee University for Service, Library Services.

Edith Powell is a retired professor in the School of Nursing and Allied Health at Tuskegee University. She is certified in clinical laboratory science and blood banking by the American Society of Clinical Pathologists and is a member of the advisory committee for Tuskegee University’s National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care.