Lloyd Tevis Miller


Lloyd Tevis Miller was an American physician who was the first medical director of the Afro-American Hospital in Yazoo City, Mississippi, the first private hospital for blacks in the state. He was also a co-founder of the Mississippi Medical and Surgical Association.

Biography

Miller was born in Natchez, Mississippi on December 6, 1872, the son of Washington Miller, a hackman and his wife, Emily. One of the few African American physicians in Mississippi, he established a medical practice in Yazoo City in the late 1890s.
In 1900, Dr. L. T. Miller was a co-founder with a dozen other doctors of the Mississippi Medical and Surgical Association, the state's largest and oldest organization representing African American health professionals.
In 1928, T.J. Huddleston established the Afro-American Hospital in Yazoo City to provide medical services for members of the Afro-American Sons and Daughters, a statewide fraternal insurance organization that provided death and hospitalization benefits to its members. Miller was chosen as the hospital's first medical director. While the facility's mission was primarily to service its members, it was also available to the general public on a fee for service basis. Given the dearth of quality health care facilities available to blacks at the time, the hospital serviced not only individuals from Yazoo City and the Delta region, but other parts of Mississippi and the South as well.
In 1933, his discovery of a lithopaedion while performing surgery to remove a tumor was reported in the media.
Dr. Miller recruited Dr. Robert Elliott Fullilove and three registered nurses to complete his staff. During its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s, the facility also operated a state licensed nursing school. Dr. Miller suffered a stroke on December 17, 1950 and died on March 8, 1951. Dr. Fullilove succeeded Miller as medical director.