Autobiography angella d ferguson books

Angella Dorothea Ferguson was born in Washington, District of Columbia Though her father was a high school teacher, had his own architectural firm, and was a United States. Army reservist, the family struggled financially, especially during the Great Depression. Angella became interested in chemistry and mathematics while attending Cardoza High School, which she graduated in She was one of eight children.

At the time there were very few African-American women who were accepted into medical schools.

Her own powerful story up to , told with warmth, brilliance, humor and conviction.

She conducted her internship and residency at Washington Freedman"s Hospital and joined the faculty at Howard University in as an instructor in pediatrics, a position she held until , when she became assistant professor of pediatrics at Freedman"s Hospital. She became a full professor at the latter hospital from to From to she was also an associate pediatrician at Freedman"s Hospital.

Her tenure there extended from to Additionally, she had her own private pediatrics practice in Washington, District of Columbia Her early research required her to understand normal development in African American children, but to her surprise no such baseline data existed. In setting out to rectify this gap in knowledge, she made the startling discovery that African American infants learned to sit and stand earlier than infants of European descent.

She attributed this trend to the fact that the parents of African American infants often did not have playpens or high chairs for them. Hence they learned to sit and stand earlier than their white counterparts. Ferguson noticed the prevalence of sickle cell disease among the infants she treated in her practice. In her work she tracked the development of the disease in African American infants.

At that time, sickle-cell anemia was a little-known disease. Through experimentation, she determined that if infants drank a glass of soda water once a day before age five, their chances of having a sickle-cell crisis — a condition in which the flow of damaged red blood cells is impeded, causing painful clogging of blood vessels — was reduced.