Historic black hospital tied to sterilization program

RALEIGH -- For years, Irene Clark has hunted for details about St. Agnes, the storied Raleigh institution once regarded as the best hospital for blacks between Hampton, Va., and New Orleans.

Clark, a retired St. Augustine's College biology professor, has rescued hospital records from the trash. She has created an archive so extensive that state history museum officials recently turned to her for information. And she has written a book-length manuscript on the hospital's history.

By the mid-1990s, Clark had begun to pick up "dots" of information that seemed to link St. Agnes and North Carolina's eugenics program -- a program that led to the sterilization of about 7,600 state residents between 1929 and 1973.

For Clark, who is 67 and lives in Raleigh, this raised two questions: Was St. Agnes in fact involved in the sterilization program? If so, did that mean that some of the pillars of Raleigh's medical community -- black and white -- had taken part?

In January, Clark received an envelope from an Iowa researcher who, years earlier, had been given almost unprecedented access to the N.C. Eugenics Board's records. Inside were the answers she had been waiting for.

"...(N)[egro], inmate Franklin County Home ... 30 years of age ... [Name redacted] is promiscuous with any man who will carry on with her, the father of her unborn baby being the son of her former landlord. She would leave her children at night and go out with an man who would come and drink whenever she could get whiskey, not caring for her children in any way ...

"Diagnosis: Feebleminded, Operation will be performed by Surgeon on staff at St. Agnes Hospital ..."

St. Agnes, founded on the St. Augustine's campus in 1896, just 31 years after the end of the Civil War, was built by students at the college in East Raleigh with hand-quarried stone.

Its nursing school offered a career option to the daughters and granddaughters of slaves. The hospital gave black male and white female physicians a place to practice long before most other area institutions would have them.

Together, hospital doctors and nurses provided care for Raleigh's black residents, affluent and indigent, until it closed in 1961.

It was this distinguished past that prompted Clark to start exploring St. Agnes' history.

"I was just so excited to learn that we had this hospital in Raleigh," she said.

Her research took a turn when she encountered a reference to "therapeutic asexualization" in a book, "Medical Morals and Manners," by Dr. Hubert A. Royster. Royster, who died in 1959, was St. Agnes' autocratic chief of staff for more than 50 years.

In the book, he described with apparent pride having performed salpingectomies (the severing of women's fallopian tubes), vasectomies and castrations at State Hospital. That hospital, which later became Dorothea Dix, served as an institution for people with mental illnesses and disabilities.

If Royster performed such operations at State Hospital on white patients, Clark wondered, did it mean that sterilizations also were performed at St. Agnes?

Clark turned to a Cary author, Lisa Towle, who was writing a medical history of Wake County.

"She said to me, 'Don't go there,' " Clark said. "This is what her editors had told her."

Towle confirmed in an interview that when she was researching her book, "A Heritage of Healing: Two Hundred Years of Medicine in Wake County," she uncovered other information about possible eugenic sterilizations. Concerned about space and accuracy, her publisher decided to leave out the entire topic.

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