The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.10, page 180, Oct. 1909, U. of Illinois Press

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The BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Papers of the Colored people. Further, I have found them, in most cases, on easy and on good terms with their professional brethren of the white race. The doctor, as a rule, is a gentleman and it is not a difficult matter for two gentlemen, no matter how they diner in color, to get on well with each other. The great and successful doctor in the future is not going to be the one who devotes himself to curing aches and pains, but one who will devote himself to keeping the human family well. The work of the doctor in the future is going to be that of preservation; preserving the body, rather than repairing the body. This idea involves a more unselfish disposition to be cultivated on the part of the doctor. In my own community at the Tuskegee Institute, where we have a population including students, teachers and other families of about three thousand people, at the present time only 9 are in doors on account of sickness. We have this high record because we have a doctor who devotes himself to keeping people well, and curing them after they have gotten sick. One of the most important functions for the leaders of the Negro race to consider at the present time is the preservation of the health of our race, especially in large cities in congested districts. The work of the Negro doctor in preserving the health of the Negro, however, is not unimportant in establishing our race. It is equally important from the standpoint of the white race. There are ten million Negroes in this country. In many sections of our country, especially in the South, these people are equal in numbers to the white people and in not a few sections, they outnumber the whites. It is just as important to the health and prosperity of the white race that the Negro have a sound, well, clean body as it is to the Negro race itself. Ten million weak and diseased bodied people cannot live in the midst of other people without the one race affecting the health of the other. There are some directions in which no color line can be drawn. Disease draws no color line; filth draws no color line. If a Negro, by reason of his ignorance of the laws of health, carries about in his body the germs of consumption, of smallpox or of the disease known as the hook-worm, these germs will spread from his body to that of the white people by whose side he lives. Negro women pre180