Much More than a Clinic: Chicago’s Free Health Centers 1968-1972

ABSTRACT

Drawing on archival evidence, I document the emergence and florescence of three free health clinics in Chicago in the late 1960s. I trace the centers’ forceful removal by the city’s Board of Health, and their subsequent replacement by Federally Qualified Health Centers (FHQCs). I argue that the demise of the free centers is exemplary of a broader trend in US health policy of regulating and diminishing the health care options of poor Americans. By highlighting the stark contrast between Chicago’s free health centers of the 1960s and the health care services offered by contemporary FQHCs, I reveal a gradual shift from health care rights to accessing care in the US health care safety net.

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KEYWORDS:

• Black Panthers
• Chicago
• free clinics
• FQHCs
• health rights
• Young Lords

Supplementary data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the research librarians Morgen MacIntosh Hodgets at DePaul University, Peggy Glowacki at UIC’s Richard Daily Library, Sigred Perry at the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Northwestern University and the staff at the Chicago History Museum, for their patient assistance; to my co-editor, Alejandro Cerón, and all contributors for their collective insights about the right to health around the world. I would also like to thank Jonathan Jerome for his editorial assistance, three anonymous reviewers of Medical Anthropology whose generous insights changed the direction of and substantially improved this article, and Lenore Manderson and Victoria Team for their energetic support.

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Jessica Jerome

Jessica Jerome is associate professor of Health Sciences at DePaul University. Her research documents the impact of right to health legislation on the experiences and health care outcomes of low-income urban residents in Brazil and the United States. She is the author of A Right to Health: Medicine, Marginality and Health Care Reform in Northeastern Brazil (2015).