As Ross celebrates Black History month, we take a look at some influential Black medical pioneers. These people include the first Black man and woman to receive a MD degree in the United States, the father of blood banking, and the inventor of the Laserphaco probe.
Rebecca Crumpler, MD (1831-1895)
Rebecca Lee Crumpler began her medical career as a nurse, but went on to become the first Black female physician in the United States when she received her MD degree from the New England Female Medical College in 1864. Dr. Crumpler practiced for many years in Boston, Mass., before moving back to Richmond, Vir. She worked with other black doctors who cared for formerly enslaved people.
“I returned to my former home, Boston, where I entered into the work with renewed vigor, practicing outside, and receiving children in the house for treatment; regardless, in a measure, of remuneration,” she wrote.
Crumpler was a published author writing, A Book of Medical Discourses: In Two Parts. Published in 1883, the book addresses children’s and women’s health.
James McCune Smith, MD (1813-1865)
James McCune Smith was born into slavery but knew he wanted to become a doctor from an early age. Racist admissions practices kept Smith from attending any medical school in the United States. So Smith attended the University of Glasgow in Scotland, becoming the first Black American to receive a medical degree.
Smith continued to be a trailblazer by becoming the first black person to own and operate a pharmacy in the United States. He was also the first black physician to be published in U.S. medical journals.
Charles Drew, MD (1904-1950)
Charles Richard Drew, MD, is known as the “father of blood banking” after pioneering techniques to preserve blood. His research explored best practices for banking and transfusions, with the insights he learned helping him establish the first large-scale blood banks.
Drew directed the Blood for Britain project during World War II. The project collected over 14,500 of plasma, which was then shipped to England.
Louis Sullivan, MD (b. 1933)
Louis Wade Sullivan, MD, was the only black student in his class at the Boston University School of Medicine. He would later serve on the faculty from 1966 to 1975. Sullivan may best be known as the founding dean of what became the Morehouse School of Medicine – the first predominantly Black medical school in the United States – when it opened in 1975.
Later, Sullivan served as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where he directed the creation of the Office of Minority Programs in the National Institutes of Health’s Office of the Director. He has also chaired numerous influential groups and institutions, from the President’s Advisory Council on Historically Black Colleges and Universities to the National Health Museum. He is CEO and chair of the Sullivan Alliance, an organization he created in 2005 to increase racial and ethnic minority representation in health care.
Patricia Bath, MD (b. 1942)
Patricia Era Bath, MD, was the first Black American to complete an ophthalmology residency with New York University’s School of Medicine, in 1973. Two years later, the UCLA School of Medicine appointed her as the first female faculty member in its department of ophthalmology. Believing that “eyesight is a basic human right,” Dr. Bath went on to cofound the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness.
In the early 1980s, Bath studied laser technology and saw its potential for eye surgery. In 1986, she invented the Laserphaco probe, a device and method for cataract treatments. When she patented the instrument, in 1988, she became the first Black female doctor to receive a patent for a medical invention.
Daniel Williams (1856-1931)
After apprenticing with a surgeon, Daniel Hale Williams earned a medical degree and started working as a surgeon in Chicago in 1884. Because of discrimination, hospitals at that time barred Black doctors from working on staff. So Dr. Williams opened the first Black-owned interracial hospital in the United States.
Provident Hospital offered training to Black interns and established America’s first school for Black nurses. On July 10, 1893, Williams successfully repaired the pericardium (the sac surrounding the heart) of a man who had been stabbed in a knife fight. The operation is considered to be the first documented successful open-heart surgery on a human, and Williams is regarded as the first Black cardiologist.
He went on to cofound the National Medical Association, and became the first Black physician admitted to the American College of Surgeons.