Professionalization includes and excludes. The doors to the house of medicine for Black physicians, especially Black women, were barred during the Progressive Era. Remarkably, a few pioneers made their way to the bedside of patients despite many obstacles. Brown builds each chapter around the story of one of these pioneers. It’s a service to see these stories brought together into a single book. It’s necessary because it’s still the case that we lose natural attorneys at every step of a Black physician’s journey– 8.4 % of medical school applicants, 7.1% of medical school acceptees, 6.2% of medical school graduates, 5% of all practicing physicians, and only 3.6% of full-time medical school faculty– identify as Black. A quibble: can the systems built on exclusion and inclusion ever commit itself to natural attorneys?