Dr. Victoria Cargill Oral History
Item
Title
Dr. Victoria Cargill Oral History
Description
Dr. Victoria Cargill grew up on a farm outside Saratoga Springs, New York. She credits the experience of "helping tend to the critters that we had" and the influence of her parents with her decision early on to become a physician. Cargill graduated high school at 16 and attended Mount Holyoke College before going to Boston University School of Medicine and then to a residency at Harvard.
It was in Boston, in 1982, while working as a part-time doctor at Fenway Community Health Clinic, that Dr. Cargill saw her first patient with AIDS. As she moved on to a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania and then a job at Case Western Reserve University, she would care for more and more people dying of AIDS complications. She would also see the disproportionate impact of the disease on Black communities become more and more apparent.
With that disproportionate impact in mind, Dr. Cargill started Stopping AIDS is My Missions (SAMM), a peer education program for African American teenagers in Cleveland that eventually grew to include four other cities in Ohio. Around the same time she also worked to develop HIV risk reduction peer education programs for women in public housing projects in Cleveland. She reports that, in addition to becoming educated about HIV/AIDS, the teens and women in these programs gained a sense of empowerment and agency over their lives.
Around the time that Dr. Cargill went to work at the National Institutes of Health in the late 1990s, there was mounting political pressure on federal agencies from the Congressional Black Caucus to do more to address AIDS in Black communities. Cargill describes the creation of the Minority AIDS Initiative in 1998 under President Bill Clinton, and explains the need for culturally competent HIV treatment and prevention programs. Finally, she discusses some of the challenges of HIV prevention with queer youth of color in house ball communities and among Black trans women, as well as the ways that experiences of systemic racism and poverty create challenges for treatment adherence in the patients that she continues to see.
The transcript of this interview has been edited for clarity by Dr. Cargill. When quoting from this interview, please refer to the PDF transcript.
Oral history interview with Dr. Victoria Cargill, conducted at the University of Pennsylvania on May 15, 2013 by Dan Royles for the African American AIDS Activism Oral History Project. This interview was transcribed by Keegan Shepherd thanks to generous support from the Chris Webber Memorial Fund.
It was in Boston, in 1982, while working as a part-time doctor at Fenway Community Health Clinic, that Dr. Cargill saw her first patient with AIDS. As she moved on to a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania and then a job at Case Western Reserve University, she would care for more and more people dying of AIDS complications. She would also see the disproportionate impact of the disease on Black communities become more and more apparent.
With that disproportionate impact in mind, Dr. Cargill started Stopping AIDS is My Missions (SAMM), a peer education program for African American teenagers in Cleveland that eventually grew to include four other cities in Ohio. Around the same time she also worked to develop HIV risk reduction peer education programs for women in public housing projects in Cleveland. She reports that, in addition to becoming educated about HIV/AIDS, the teens and women in these programs gained a sense of empowerment and agency over their lives.
Around the time that Dr. Cargill went to work at the National Institutes of Health in the late 1990s, there was mounting political pressure on federal agencies from the Congressional Black Caucus to do more to address AIDS in Black communities. Cargill describes the creation of the Minority AIDS Initiative in 1998 under President Bill Clinton, and explains the need for culturally competent HIV treatment and prevention programs. Finally, she discusses some of the challenges of HIV prevention with queer youth of color in house ball communities and among Black trans women, as well as the ways that experiences of systemic racism and poverty create challenges for treatment adherence in the patients that she continues to see.
The transcript of this interview has been edited for clarity by Dr. Cargill. When quoting from this interview, please refer to the PDF transcript.
Oral history interview with Dr. Victoria Cargill, conducted at the University of Pennsylvania on May 15, 2013 by Dan Royles for the African American AIDS Activism Oral History Project. This interview was transcribed by Keegan Shepherd thanks to generous support from the Chris Webber Memorial Fund.
Date
May 15, 2013
Contributor
Dan Royles
Rights
African American AIDS History Project and African American AIDS Activism Oral History Project are licensed by Dan Royles under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Please note individual copyright restrictions for some images.
Subject
Cargill, Dr. Victoria See all items with this value
