Heartland: Service to Man

“Service to Man” is an interesting bit of history that casts a new light on familiar tales of racism and integration during the 1960s. In that era, few mainstream medical schools accepted black students. So a few regional institutions that catered to African-Americans, like Meharry Medical College in Nashville, shouldered the burden.

It was a closed system that everyone understood and accepted: Black professors taught the next generation of black doctors so they could go out and serve the black community. It was the ultimate perversion of the “separate but equal” doctrine, all so that white doctors didn’t have to touch black patients and vice-versa.

The title comes from the Meharry motto, “Dedicated to the Worship of God Through Service To Man.”

In 1967 two white students are admitted to the college, and are forced to endure demeaning put-downs from the professors and outright hostility from their fellow students.

The top student in the school, Michael DuBois (Christopher Livingston), lays it out to a white student in the starkest terms: Because you are here, that means one less black doctor in the world.

Eli Rosenberg (Morgan Auld) is pretty upfront about why he is attending Meharry: It’s the only medical school he could get into. A tough kid from Brooklyn, he’s prepared to suffer the slings and arrows if it gets him closer to his goal of becoming a doctor. He even starts to fall for an African-American student (Sydney Morton), and learns a little bit about the treatment black people receive in white society.

Michael is his chief antagonist. The son of a doctor and alum, he’s determined to put the upstart in his place. The two engage in a long contest of wills that inevitably leads to a thaw and the beginning of friendship.

Lamman Rucker and Seth Panitch play the main professors at Meharry, who believe in an old-school philosophy about breaking down students before you build them up. Though sometimes we wonder if they forgot about the building-up part.

Panitch’s character is also white, and his relationship with Eli takes on different shadings as things go on. Keith David plays the imperious Dean Holmes, who has a penchant of inviting students passing by his office in for an interrogation-slash-quiz.

Michael Pantozzi plays Zack, the other white student, perpetually at the bottom of the class. I also enjoyed Leopold Manswell and Eric Marable Jr. as a pair of cut-up medical students who give Eli the hardest time to begin with, and slowly come to embrace him as a colleague.

Panitch wrote the screenplay and also co-directed the film with Aaron Greer. The movie has a decidedly stilted feel to it, and the rote editing and musical cues often have it wandering into “TV Movie of the Week” territory.

Still, it’s an earnest historical drama with a solid cast and an engaging story to tell.