Research Guides: Caribbean American Heritage Month: Caribbean Heritage Month and Health Sciences

What's On This Page?

Check out resources for Caribbean American Heritage Month related to the health sciences!

Examples of Notable Caribbean Americans in Health Care

José Celso Barbosa Alcala
A physician and politician from Puerto Rico.
Patricia Bath
An ophthalmologist with Trinidadian heritage.
Paul Bertau Cornely
A physician and public health practitioner who was born in Guadaloupe, lived in Puerto Rico for a time, and later lived in various parts of the continental U.S.
Naomi Broering
Former President of the Medical Library Association. Has Puerto Rican heritage.
Muguette Guenneguez
Former Executive Director of National Alliance on Mental Health - Seattle. Was born in Haiti.
Nadine Burke Harris
California's first Surgeon General, a position that was created in 2019. Has Jamaican heritage.
Nathan Francis Mossell
A physician whose family had connections to Trinidad.
Karen E. Nelson
Microbiologist with seminal work on the microbiome. Chief Scientific Officer at Thermo Fischer. Was born in Jamaica and moved to the U.S.
Ildaura Murillo-Rohde
A nurse who was born in Panama, one of the countries around the Caribbean Sea, and lived in various places in the U.S. Founder of the National Association of Hispanic Nurses.
Diane Patrick
Former First Lady of Massachusetts and used that position to advocate for mental health and domestic violence support. Served on the board of local health systems. Has Nevisian descent.
Helen Rodríguez Trías
A physician and women's rights activist from Puerto Rico.
John H. Rapier, Jr.
Civil rights activist and physician with a background in dentistry. Lived for a time in Haiti and Jamaica.
Mabel Keaton Staupers
Nursing activist who fought for integration in military nursing. Was born in Barbados and moved to the U.S.

Finding Health Information about People with Caribbean American Heritage

These search strategies can help you get started. They do not include every potentially relevant term for people with Caribbean American heritage. Use them as a model and adapt as needed.

In PubMed
You will need to copy and paste the search from this document into the PubMed search box. Persistent links to searches in PubMed list all of the search terms. This search is too long for browsers to process. If you paste the search into the search box, PubMed uses a workaround to get your results.
In CINAHL
The full search history is available from this downloadable Excel file