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Dr. Bascom Waugh<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In 1950, Dr. Bascom Waugh became the first African-American doctor to join the medical staff at Cooper. A World War II veteran, Dr. Waugh was a former flight surgeon for the 332nd Fighter Group, the legendary Tuskegee Airmen. According to a 2007 Air Force School of Medicine report, Dr. Waugh was one of the first two African-American doctors to be trained alongside Caucasian physicians in the Army’s School of Aviation near San Antonio. He joined 17 other African American flight surgeons supporting the approximately 1,000 Tuskegee-trained pilots, and he was one of only six who served in combat during the war. When he returned from the war in 1946, Dr. Waugh opened a family medicine practice in Camden, where he worked until he died in 1992.<\/p>\n
“My father was the kind of person who got up early every day, did his exercises, got dressed, and went to work,” Dyann Waugh, Dr. Waugh’s daughter, once told a local newspaper reporter. “He didn’t talk about himself … he was a very humble person.” Waugh, who became a doctor like her father, remembers him saying, “Kid, you got to treat people the way you’d like to be treated.”<\/p>\n
According to Cooper officials, Dr. Waugh not only provided medical care to thousands of Camden City residents, he was an inspiration and role model to African-Americans from all over the region who were interested in health care careers. He broke racial barriers during a time when discrimination was common, even in the field of medicine.<\/p>\n
This text is excerpted from “Cooper: The Story of Cooper Hospital 1887-2017” (c) 2018 by Cooper University Health Care.<\/p>\n