Joseph Irvin Hoffman, Jr., MD

Dr. Hoffmann was born in Charleston in 1900. His paternal grandfather was German, hence the name Hoffmann; the rest of his grandparents were black. He received his high school education at the Avery School in Charleston and his medical education at Howard University in Washington D.C. and Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. A white physician cared for him when he was a youngster but he used a black physician when he was in his teens, and the young Hoffmann came to know and admire the prominent black physicians at the Hospital and Training School for nurses. When he graduated from medical school in 1929, he was offered a practice in Corona, New York. He had inherited his grandfather Hoffmann's fair skin and could have passed for white in the North, but he chose to return to Charleston and work among the physicians he admired. He did so for fifty years, retiring in 1979. His son, Joseph Irving Hoffman III, graduated from Harvard Medical School and became an orthopedic surgeon in Atlanta.

In 1980 Dr. Hoffmann was interviewed at length about his childhood, his education, and his career. Transcripts of those interviews provide a fascinating glimpse of twentieth century life in Charleston's black community and are available in the archives of the Avery Research Center in Charleston.