Trade Card for Ayer's Cathartic Pills, 1883

This late 19th-century trade card showing a 'country doctor' may have appealed to white northern consumers who felt a sense of relief that formerly enslaved populations still received medical care. But this idyllic view did not represent a realistic experience for the vast majority of Black Americans living during that time. Racial prejudice and Jim Crow segregation effectively blocked most African Americans from becoming doctors.