Xavier medical school names founding dean

By Mason Harrison
Contributing Writer

After a major site selection and personnel announcement on April 29, Xavier University of Louisiana is one step closer to joining the small club of historically Black colleges that are home to medical schools across the country.

Dr. Reynold Verret, president of Xavier University, named Dr. Leonardo Seoane, executive vice president and chief academic officer of Ochsner Health, as the burgeoning facility’s founding dean and the BioDistrict’s Benson Tower as the location for what will become the only HBCU-led college of medicine in the Gulf South.

Dubbed the Xavier Ochsner College of Medicine, the new school, expected to open within the next five years, will “address long-standing health disparities and foster stronger, healthier communities,” Verret said, adding that the Ochsner partnership, which decades ago helped launch Xavier’s college of pharmacy and a physician assistant program, is part of the university’s “mission to promote a more just society.”

In 1896, New Orleans was home to the first Black hospital in the South, the Phyllis Wheatley Sanitarium and Training School of Negro Nurses, founded by members of the city’s Phyllis Wheatley Club who two years prior set out to create a teaching hospital for medical professionals in a city with few Black medics.

A decade later, the Wheatley school, then known as Flint Medical College, was forced to close along with a handful of other Black facilities following a scathing review of health care across the country, backed by the American Medical Association, that gutted the medical field of thousands of Black workers barred from practicing or training in white facilities which contributed to the current shortage of Black doctors.

The Flint school reopened as Flint-Goodridge Hospital and in 1930 came under the stewardship of the newly created Dillard University where it remained a center of Black health care until the facility closed in 1983.

Seoane acknowledged the historical shortage of Black doctors in his remarks at a signing ceremony to announce his deanship and to christen the Xavier-Ochsner partnership. “By addressing the critical shortage of physicians in standing up this HBCU medical school,” he said, “[we] will pursue diversity in medicine and ensure equitable representation in health care to better serve our communities for generations to come.”

Seoane said the new medical college will also help foster “health care equity in New Orleans.”

Black Americans account for just over 13 percent of the U.S. population while Black doctors represent approximately six percent of the profession. Research points to better health outcomes, improved satisfaction and increased trust in the medical system among Black patients when they are treated by Black physicians.

Gayle Benson, the proprietor of Benson Tower, spoke at the signing ceremony and called the new medical project a “job creator” and a valuable contributor to the city’s BioDistrict, a downtown economic development zone designed to spur research and commercial growth in southeast Louisiana’s biosciences field.

The Xavier medical school will join Howard University College of Medicine, Morehouse School of Medicine, Meharry Medical College and Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science as the only HBCUs in the country to boast medical schools, with nascent plans at Morgan State University to join the list.

This article originally published in the May 6, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.