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Balm in Gilead
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Available on Feb 09, 2027 | 7 Hours
The intimate, extraordinary biography of Dr. Margaret Morgan Lawrence, America’s first Black female psychoanalyst—penned by her own daughter, now with a new afterword
Margaret Morgan, raised in Mississippi in the 1910s, knows she’s meant to be a doctor—and that she’ll have to fight for it. At fourteen, she convinces her parents to let her move to New York, where she can live with extended family and pursue her education. Four years later, she’s admitted on full scholarship as the only Black undergraduate to Cornell, but is not allowed to live in the dorms. Undeterred, she stays laser-focused on her medical science courses and her future.
Falling in love while home on college summer break, Margaret is repeatedly warned by mentors that women in the early twentieth century can be wives, or they can be doctors—but not both. In 1936, Cornell, the same institution that once gave her a scholarship, refuses to admit her as a Black medical student. Despite these setbacks, Margaret refuses to accept limitation of any kind. She embarks on a romance that will last half a century, and is accepted into Columbia to pursue her medical degree.
Told throughout the years to come that she is too Black, too female, too married, too pregnant to survive in the medical field, Margaret nonetheless excels. She finds her life’s work in pediatric psychiatry, serving children in Harlem for decades, and becomes an enduring model of resilience, wisdom, and empathy.
In 1988, Margaret’s daughter, celebrated sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, documented her mother’s singular life with grace and conviction. Along the way, she also traced the legacy of four generations who had raised and shaped Margaret: generations of justice-seeking, teaching, and healing, as well as of sorrow and the pain of deep prejudice. Now, four decades later, Lawrence-Lightfoot offers a new afterword illuminating the enduring legacy of Margaret’s life—a life of courage, love, and activism—bringing this essential biography back into the light.
Margaret Morgan, raised in Mississippi in the 1910s, knows she’s meant to be a doctor—and that she’ll have to fight for it. At fourteen, she convinces her parents to let her move to New York, where she can live with extended family and pursue her education. Four years later, she’s admitted on full scholarship as the only Black undergraduate to Cornell, but is not allowed to live in the dorms. Undeterred, she stays laser-focused on her medical science courses and her future.
Falling in love while home on college summer break, Margaret is repeatedly warned by mentors that women in the early twentieth century can be wives, or they can be doctors—but not both. In 1936, Cornell, the same institution that once gave her a scholarship, refuses to admit her as a Black medical student. Despite these setbacks, Margaret refuses to accept limitation of any kind. She embarks on a romance that will last half a century, and is accepted into Columbia to pursue her medical degree.
Told throughout the years to come that she is too Black, too female, too married, too pregnant to survive in the medical field, Margaret nonetheless excels. She finds her life’s work in pediatric psychiatry, serving children in Harlem for decades, and becomes an enduring model of resilience, wisdom, and empathy.
In 1988, Margaret’s daughter, celebrated sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, documented her mother’s singular life with grace and conviction. Along the way, she also traced the legacy of four generations who had raised and shaped Margaret: generations of justice-seeking, teaching, and healing, as well as of sorrow and the pain of deep prejudice. Now, four decades later, Lawrence-Lightfoot offers a new afterword illuminating the enduring legacy of Margaret’s life—a life of courage, love, and activism—bringing this essential biography back into the light.
Author
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, a MacArthur Prize-winning sociologist, is the Emily Hargroves Fisher Professor Emeritas at Harvard University and the author of eleven books. In 1993, she was awarded Harvard’s George Ledlie Prize for research that makes “the most valuable contribution to science and is to “the benefit of mankind”. She is the recipient of thirty-one honorary degrees and is the first African-American Woman in Harvard’s history to have an endowed professorship named in her honor.
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